Watchfulness (Matthew 24)

    “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” (Matthew 24: 42).

      In Nomine, etc..

     We’ve entered the season of Advent, and the beginning of a new liturgical year. Of course, we experience more than one new beginning every year. There’s the civil New Year that begins on January 1, there’s the school year that begins every August or September, which I suspect every parent of school-age children experiences as the real new year, regardless of the civil or the church calendar. And Orthodox Christians begin their liturgical year on September 1. We remember that in the Old Style calendar, the New Year began on March 25, followed by a week of celebration culminating on April 1, April Fools Day, which we still commemorate, more or less, every year. So we have our choice of new years, every year. We have more than one opportunity, every year, to have a sense of beginning anew, starting fresh, without being attached to one way, and one way only, of experiencing the passing of time. We have three or four new years, each year, to wake us  up, to remind us of the passing of time, to get our attention, to call us out of habit and routine, to become aware of the real situations in which we find ourselves, to become watchful in fact, to be ready for the unexpected, as Our Lord is telling us to do in today’s Gospel.

     As we know, there are two themes in the Advent season, Incarnation and the Second Coming. The Second Coming is called in the New Testament the Parousia, which means presence or arrival. Our Lord is telling us to be aware of his presence, of his continuous presence and future arrival. The 24th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel is about signs of the end of the age, persecution to come, sacrilege to be suffered, false prophets and false messiahs to be avoided, and about the coming of the Son of Man, whose angels will gather his elect from the four winds. These are alarming signs and stern warnings. They are, in fact, not only warnings about a future; they are  descriptions of the dark side of the ancient world, and of our world too. Things haven’t changed much in two thousand years.

     It seems to me that, in telling us to keep awake, Our Lord is telling us not so much to be looking forward, anxiously or otherwise, to an unpredictable future event, as he is telling us to pay attention to present reality. “You do not know on what day your Lord is coming,” is a way of saying, “You do not know when you will see the real nature of things; you do not know when the veil of routine, of ordinary daily life will fall away and you will see life, the world, in all their glory!” We have glimpses of this when we mark new year commemorations, and for a moment we see things afresh, and we begin again, and then the veil of routine returns. Our Lord refers to this when he says, “Before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” Now the surface meaning of this passage is clear; it is a description of a catastrophic flood event of a  kind we know well, and of heedless people being swept away in a natural disaster. But there is more to this passage than its literal surface meaning.

    The passage does not have to mean only that a lot of heedless people were swept away and drowned. It can mean that the flood, that is, the power and presence of God, can sweep through the routines of life and clear them away, so that what is left is a new perception of life and the world. The Noah story is about just that, clearing away all that blocks our perception of the world as God sees it, and as God means us to see it. The world after Noah is a new Eden.  Our Lord calls this “the coming of the Son of Man.” Our Zen Buddhist friends call this “the falling away of body and mind,” that is, the falling away of all that blocks our perception of reality. And it is reality, divine reality in the world, that Our Lord wants us to wake up to.

     We are awake when we do not take the routines of life to be the whole of life. We are awake when we do not take superficial, partial explanations of reality for the whole of it. We are awake when we ignore false prophets and false messiahs. We are awake when we pay attention to Our Lord.

    So let us take the  opportunity given us by the arrival of this new church year, another new beginning, to shake off the slumber of routine, and to wake to the arrival at any time, of the coming of the Son of Man.

     “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

    In Nomine, etc.. Amen.  (26.XI.16 Adv. Latin)

     

             

Sadducees and the Resurrection (Luke 20)

    “Then some of the scribes answered, Teacher, you have spoken well.” Luke 20:39.

    In the Name etc.

    Much of chapter 20 of Luke’s Gospel, in which today’s reading is included, is a series of questions to Jesus, challenges really, and Jesus’s replies. The challenges and replies present some of Jesus’s techniques as a spiritual guide. They also present Jesus’s point of view, if I can put it that way, as less earth-bound and narrow and literal than that of his challengers. And Jesus’s point of view, whether expressed or not, is part of his teaching.

    First, there is the challenge to Jesus’s authority, at the beginning of the chapter, by priests, scribes, and elders, the religious authorities of the time. He replies by asking a question of them, about the source of John the Baptist’s authority: is it human or divine? They decline to choose, and so does Jesus. But he does answer; his reply makes it clear that Jesus has authority in himself, because in him there is no division between human and divine. Jesus doesn’t need to choose one or the other, and he is prodding his challengers to understand that they don’t need to choose one or the other. This comes from Jesus’s own awareness of his closeness, his unity, with the Father. And Jesus’s hearers, by not arguing back, show us that they may perceive, without saying so, the reality of Jesus’s awareness of his own true nature, and perhaps they have glimpsed, however unconsciously, that they are free of any need to make a choice  between the human and the divine.

     The next challenge is the question about paying taxes, whether it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. The authorities “sent spies who pretended to be honest,” so we know what Luke thinks of this challenge, and probably all such challenges. But Jesus refuses to be entangled in the question, or to be worried about spies, and uses the opportunity to free his questioners from the need to see a conflict between the emperor and God, or, to put it another way, to free them from their need to see a conflict between the human and the divine, or to have to choose between them. The Gospel says, “being amazed by his answer, they became silent.” In their silence, they begin to perceive what Jesus is opening up to them. By leading his challengers into silence, Jesus is making it possible for them to experience a new truth.

    And so we come to today’s Gospel, the Sadducees’ question about the Resurrection. It is apparently intended as another trap, a trick question like the others. In any case, Jesus doesn’t fall for this one either. We get a glimpse into the reasoning of the Sadducees, who present the paradox of the seven brothers being married successively to the same woman. And they take for granted that the woman is defined only as someone’s wife. They assume that earthly relationships will continue in eternity. The Sadducees make the interesting point that the purpose of marrying a widow is to “raise up children for his brother,” as the law of Moses says they’re supposed to do. In other words, the only immortality that the Sadducees believe in is the continuation of a family line. In their view, not only is there no resurrection, there is no earthly immortality either in this story, a double challenge to Jesus. How will Jesus answer this double challenge, to decide whose wife the woman will be, and to say something about her, and her seven husbands’, lack of earthly descendants, in apparent violation of the Law of Moses? The Sadducees think they’ve got Jesus here, stuck between an unanswerable conundrum about resurrection and a story about an unfulfilled earthly need for descendants, to fulfill the law of Moses , and also the only immortality that the Sadducees believe in. Tricky problems indeed, for Jesus to unravel.

    And  unravel them he does. To this challenge Jesus actually gives a straight answer in plain words, altho the intent is the same as with the other challenges: to free his hearers from a narrow and literal way of thinking, and to open their minds to an expanded understanding.

    “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but...in the resurrection...neither marry nor are given in marriage.” In other words, earthly roles and genders are left behind. The Sadducees’ problem is nonexistent. Jesus is liberating them from having to think in everyday, this-world categories. In our own time, obsessed as many are with gender and sexuality and much else besides, this teaching is a corrective,  reminding us to subordinate our limited, earthly concerns to an awareness of ourselves and everyone else, past, present, and future, as spiritual beings with an eternal destiny, in which our earthly lives are only beginnings, first steps in the journey to the divine.

    Those who neither marry nor are given in marriage are “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age,” that age being eternity. We leave behind this world and everything in it, to enter that age. As the Apostle says in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” The Sadducees think that flesh and blood should inherit, and indeed according to them there is nothing else but perishable, earthly inheritance. But Our Lord makes it clear that there is more than flesh and blood, more than the limitations of this world. “Indeed they cannot die any more, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection,” he says. They have left behind this world.

    We are children of the resurrection when we leave behind narrow, earth-bound, literal-minded ways of thinking, and open ourselves to the life-giving presence of God. We do that by letting Jesus challenge what we take for granted, and by remaining in the silence into which he leads us, when he answers our questions. We understand that we don’t need to choose between the human and the divine; we understand that we don’t have to restrict ourselves to this-world ways of thinking, and we realize that to be human is to be on a journey to God. Then, with the priests and scribes and elders and Sadducees, we perceive the reality that Jesus is opening up to us. Then we may say with the scribes, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” In the Name, etc.. Amen. (6.XI.16. Adv.-n.d.)