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Today is Holy Saturday. The Drama of God in Christ Incarnate and Crucified came to its tragic climax on Good Friday. And now "it is finished". There is no drama between the cross and the empty grave. Simply that stillness that is death, the endless patience that is waiting, the pervasive silence of finality, the end of unbearable pain in the elimination of life itself. "It is finished", may be read by those knowing the story as a cry of triumph, the satisfied completion of redemption by One conscious of its cost and its consequences for a broken and suffering Creation. But that is to short circuit the reality, and underestimate the cost and the consequeces of that suffering for the One who bore it, and for those who witnessed it, before they ever found the faith and power to witness to it.

One of my favourite images of the broken-heartedness of God and the broken-heartedness of Jesus' followers, is a masterpiece of art because it allows the deepest anguish to be spoken and imagined through the artist's portrayal of human grief in all its disabling bewilderment. "The Descent from the Cross" by Van Der Weyden is in several ways an impossible painting.

Impossible to contemplate without being drawn into the emotional agony of those impotent to reverse the death of One they love. Nothing is left to do but weep over the body of the absent Beloved.

Impossible to read without having our theological naivete challenged by the depiction of pain, despair and loss of meaning conveyed by contorted bodies and and faces of human beings like ourselves overwhelmed by catastrophe. And in this painting, the bodily form of Jesus in the repose of death, is reflected in the bodily form of Mary in her faint of utter loss. So the artist mirrors the Incarnate Son of God and Mary his mother in her utter humanity, and the same catstrophe has befallen both Mary and God, the death of their Son.

Impossible, because there is just too much pain, lostness, bewilderment and unassuaged sorrow for one picture to bear. The details of the faces trace lines of suffering that will remain forever on faces that have looked on the agony of God; the tears are jewelled testaments of the human capacity for empathy; and the implied silence of no one speaking out of that deep knowing that is so baffled by the enormity of human cruelty, and the mystery of divine love, that words fully and finally fail.

Oh you tears,

I'm thankful that you run.

Though you trickle in the darkness,

you shall glitter in the sun.

The rainbow could not shine if the rain refused to fall:

and the eyes that can not weep are the saddest eyes of all.

Holy Saturday is the day when we are confronted by our helplessness and inarticulacy before the brutal sophistication of human cruelty, the inexhaustible resourcefulness of evil and the human love affair with violence. The crucifixion of Jesus is finished; the body can be disposed of, and so is reclaimed by hands shaking with shock. The tears and weeping of everyone in Van Der Weyden's painting are the tears of the world; the bodies wilting with sorrow and wrung into postures of mourning, tell of love orphaned of the Beloved. Yet with trembling tenderness and the collaborative care of a community melded by anguish, they receive back the body of Jesus.

This painting knows nothing of resurrection. Its purpose is to portray the aching, empty void that is left when love incarnate is extinguished, when hope is eclipsed by the indisputable evidence of embodied death, and therefore when faith and trust in any future worth having are reduced to their opposites despair, guilt and emotional collapse. The third day is an eternity away from this second day; but van Der Weyden knew, and we know, that on the third day eternity will engulf a new creation, and the Resurrection will reverse those penultimate polarities of death, evil, hate and violence. This second day of emptiness, defeat and death is the middle act of a drama whose conclusion is Resurrection.

There are days when you feel needed, wanted, significant, have a place, belong. The problem is if every day has to feel that way, as if there could be no authentic sense of meaning and purpose without that inner feeling that I matter, and am needed. From there it is a short distance to weighing my significance by living a vicarious life, value, worth and esteem borrowed from other people's affection, dependence or say so.

These reflections come a few days after a day that was full, and perhaps too full to do justice to everything that is being fitted into the hours and minutes with more precision than is good for me or the others I encountered that day. Arrangements for a funeral serrvice of loved friend fitted around the many other things his family have to attend to. A visit to the school where as chaplain I have privileged access to a staff and over 200 children who are a wonderfully vibrant and noisy community where learning is about growing up into people who will make a difference around them. Two further visits to talk with folk who have ideas about how as a church we can grow towards being a vital community hub using our resources to bring love and life to our wider community. Then evening meal with our some of our younger family and a chance to catch up accompanied by nonsense, fun and laughter. Then the Church AGM and our review of how the year has been, and how we see our next year in this journey after Jesus, trying to keep up with him, following his footsteps, receiving and sharing his grace, embodying and practising his love.

So what to make of a day immersed in the lives of others, in a week on which other days were equally populated with people and rotating around meetings. It's hard to explain the privilege and contentment such friendships and encounters bring. Days like those only happen well if there are other days, when there is time to pray, and think, and recover equilibrium – not as self-indulgence but as a responsible stewardship of this instrument of God called by St Francis, brother body. And that's mostly what I've done yesterday and today.

The picture is of my friend who is a lover of jazz. Murray died last week, after a  number of years coping with the consequences of Alzheimer's. Today I will share his funeral service with his family and our church. Somewhere within that gentle gift of a man, there is music, which I choose to believe means heaven has just accepted another member of its jazz club, a place where improvisation prevents an eternity of monotonous angel choirs!

In the 1970's one of the daily spectacles at the University of Glasgow was academics wandering around, at times rushing around, wearing black academic gowns. In  the West of Scotland during September to May the worst of the weather played havoc with these least practical of uniforms. A regular sight around Trinity College and the Gilmorehill campus was Professor W H C Frend, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, that glad mixture of occasional eccentricity, acknowledged intellectual brilliance, and great enthusiasms about things few people knew much about, but of which he was impressively expert. Early Christian martyrdom and the catacombs, the Donatists and the Monophysites, Apollinaris and Theodore of Mopsuestia are not areas of intellectual enquiry over-populated by students, unless they happened to be in Frend's lecture rooms.

Frend's magnum opus, The Rise of Christianity was published in 1980. It is a comprehensive history of the first centuries of the Christian Church, explores the nature and origins of Christian civilisation, and of particular interest refuses to suppress the divergence of traditions and different tributaries which flow into the great stream of Christian history. One reviewer explains why this book is a great read – " how thoughtful its attention to both large historical currents and the little people and details that form the bed and force the eddying, of history's great stream."

I was asked recently about resources that support the historicity of the existence of Jesus. There remains a debate with more radical sceptics about whether Jesus ever lived at all, or whether he is a mythologised figure imposed on history. Sure there are apologetic works that show the obvious historical footprints of Jesus inside and outside the New Testament. But by far the most overwhelming evidence is provided in a book like this, written by a historian whose disciplined attention to facts combines with restrained and precise weighing of the evidence that enables the best probabilities of interpretation. Now of course it would be possible to claim still, that a Christian is hardly the most objective and sceptical of investigators into historical verisimilitude. But it would be a claim hard to substantiate.

First, Frend is an archaeologist, and this history is thoroughly sprinkled with archaeological evidence, from papyri to graffitti, and statues to mosaics, and ruins to maps, and receipts to manumission certificates. He was for a time Associate Director of the Egypt Exploration Society. Second, during the Second World War Frend served as Assistant Principal to the War Office, was on the liaison committee with the Free French and the Polish Resistance, worked in the Psychological Warfare Section, and later stood as a candidate for the Liberal Party. None of this guarantees a man is trustworthy, but it does demolish the assumption he was a clerical academic in an ivory tower.  Third, the sweep and range of this book, its detailed nailing down of historical data and interpretive caution, make this a fascinating education in the power of a cumulative argument.

We need humungous books, and need to read them – well, how about one a year, just choose them carefully. In the history of Christian origins there are four one volume attempts which immediately come to mind. Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society is by the doyen of early Christian history – his small volume, The Early Church, in the Pelican History of the Church is an elegant gem of a book. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom is a massive and erudite narrative from the leading historian of ancient Mediterranean history – his biography of Augustine is still the volume of choice on that infuriatingly complex theologian. R P C Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God is more historical theology, but it is theological development tightly woven with historical context, and is both authoritative and provocative.

Then there is Frend's book. No shortage of options, and if you can read only one, and want to read one, then my vote would be for Frend as readable, affordable, and well worth a long slow read – 10 pages a day for 3 months would do it 🙂

Flannery O'Connor famously said she liked Barth because he threw the furniture around, an image of the theologian as interior designer weary of the dull, worn out sofas of the theologically comfortable. Marilynne Robinson shares O'Connor's delight in scholar theologians who do theology for the health of the church, even if that offends the settled ideas and complacent certainties of a church too fond of its own home comforts.

Barth's early contemporary Dietrich Bonhoeffer could do some furniture hurling of his own. His is a theology forged under the pressure presses of Nazism and a National Church selling its soul for power. There is something of a temple-cleansing zeal in Bonhoeffer's theology, a deliberate and orchestrated overturning of the theological tables, as he raises his voice and tells what the Church of God is for. Bonhoeffer's is a disturbingly destabilising voice, declaring why the Church can never allow its house and household to be furnished with the alien trappings of power comfortable with whatever it has to do to achieve its all consuming goal, power.This isn't a gentle exercise of feng-shui, this is a house clearing.

One of the major weaknesses in evangelical thought is the absence of an ecclesiology adequate to its own Gospel. What is a theology of the Church that is built on the Gospel of reconciliation, eternal gestures of redemptive love, God's grace as judgement in mercy, forgiveness of sins? Where is the radical community that claims to be founded on a radical Gospel? The works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer are replete with answers to hese questions. From his thesis Sanctum Communio, to Life Together, his survival manual for persecuted pastors, to his exposition of the stringent rigour of the Sermon on the Mount as the paradigm of discipleship, and to letters, sermons and lectures – the recurring insistence, the church is Christ's body, called to be his likeness, and the embodied presence of the redeemer-judge.

Two out of hundreds of examples are enough food for thought for one day:

"The church is subjected to all the weakness and suffering of the world. The church can, at times, like Christ himself, be without a roof over its head….Real worldliness consists in the church's being able to renounce all privileges and all its property but never Christ's Word and the forgiveness of sins. With Christ and the forgiveness of sins to fall back on, the church is free to give up everything else." (True Freedom, p. 87-88)

"Christians should give much more offence, shock the world far more, than they are now doing. Christians should take  stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than consider the possible moral right of the strong." (DBW, vol 13, p.411)

During Lent I have been trying to evolve an ecology of speech, a way with words that is hospitable to life. This includes learning to talk and to be silent at the right times and places, being careful to remember the capacity of words to have an afterlife once they have fallen into the soil of our own or other people's lives. Do they create a fertile, balanced humus in which new life can germinate and flourish?

Once you start looking in the Bible for clues and commandments about how to speak and listen, how to use words and not abuse people, once you are attuned to the words of a God who speaks in the Word and Wisdom of Jesus Christ, and in the words of Scripture, then you begin to notice just how much of Christian obedience depends on a spirituality of words and an ethic of speaking.  What is said and thought and heard in all the speaking and conversing and silences of a community creates an ethos, forms an environment, which either promotes a healthy eco-system or seeps toxins into the landscape of our lives. 

The connection between speech and human flourishing is woven throughout Psalm 19, a Torah psalm which celebrates the Word and words of God. I've read this Psalm countless times, preached on it and pondered its beauty of rhythm, prayed it and felt its power to re-align my inner life. The hymn to creation in verses 1-6 compels the move from introspection to wonder, pushes the horizons of our chronic self-preoccupation outwards into the infinite geometry of the heavens that declare the glory of God, contradicting those default assumptions that place us at the centre of things.

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
² Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
³ They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
⁴ Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

Those four parallel couplets link speech to creation, and creation to doxology. Our speaking is a faint and far away echo of Creation's praise, our words but the incidental shuffling of a foot or two, in an audience overwhelmed by a symphony orchestra blazing out the thunderous climax of Gounod's Sanctus from the Messe Solenelle de Sainte Cecilia. The truth and reality of God the Creator is heard in the hum and harmony of the heavens. So all my words and sentences, my serious speaking and most casual or intimate conversations, my truth telling and lies, complaints and prayers, the whole orchestrated cacophony of my lifetime of speaking, take place against the timeless rhythms and cadences of the hymn of the universe, orchestrated by the Creator. As that wise sceptical commentator on human foolishness said, "God is in heaven, you are on earth, so let your words be few." (Ecclesiastes 5.2) This Psalm encourages us to shut up long enough to hear what's going on all around us, and without our say so, usually without our even noticing. And if we shut up long enough we will hear Creation's praise.

What I find impressive in verses 3 and 4 is the eloquence of Creation through the absence of speech, words and sound, a paradox so powerful it calls in question our own addiction to the sound of our own voices. The body langauage of creation demonstrates the glory and generosity, the imagination and purpose, the creativity and wisdom of the God who has made all that is, and sustains it by His Word.

An ethic of language may have to include a willingness to examine not only our words but our body language, our non-verbal communication. What would Christian witness look like if the Gospel was demonstrated by our body language, if Jesus was spoken in our ways of relating and communicating to others by generous giving, sacrificial being alongside, loving interest, if we were compassion, kindness and justice personified. In other words, words are essential to human life and relatedness and community – but just as necessary are those actions and dispositions that tell without saying, that show without defining, those redemptive gestures of which it could be said…

³ They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
⁴ Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

I've said enough! For now……

Why I love Jean Vanier

"One of the dangers of our time is that information is reaching saturation point and we only register our superficial knowledge. It is good to train our intelligence onto a tiny fragment of this huge body of knowledge which reflects the hugeness of the universe of things visible and invisible. If we look more deeply at a particular aspect – whether this is the growth cycle of the potato or the meaning of a single word of the Bible – we can touch the mystery through it. When we train our intelligence onto a single subject, we enter the world of wonder and contemplation. Our whole being is renewed when we touch the light of God hidden at the heart of things."

( Jean Vanier, Communty and Growth, 1979 edition, p. 133)

Then there is Psalm 19 which also speaks of the light of God, and the praise of God "hidden at the heart of things:

¹ The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
² Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
³ They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
⁴ Yet their voice^[b] goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

On a journey home from Montrose I stopped "to train my intelligence" on an early rising moon, and "entered the world of wonder and contemplation". I take photos for pleasure, and fun, and memories, and love, and curiosity and many other reasons – but also sometimes out of sheer wonder, and the sense of the moment when we glimpse "the light of God hidden at the heart of things. This photo was taken at a time when life was overclouded by anxieties – it is a favourite picture, looked at now and then to remind me I'm not the centre of the universe, God is.

Now that I am semi-retired, a status and role as difficult to play as semi dead, or semi-working, it is true I have a lot more "discretionary time". Now there's a phrase coated in the seasoning of arrogance – as if time was a possession to be used at my discretion. I am a Christian, which means I try to live in that place of paradox, under the cross and beside an empty tomb. As a disciple I am crucified with Christ and risen with Christ; by my baptism I have died, risen and am called to walk in newness of life. That means every moment of time is both gift I receive and service I offer to Christ, and there's nothing discretionary about that.

It's a commonplace, and quite a tired one, to be told that Christians never retire. But that word retire, and it's capacity to enthuse or depress us is going to depend on how any one of us thinks of work, leisure, Christian life and existence, and how we understand our own place and purpose in the life God gives us, and what we make of it. Seeking God's place and purpose, and living faithfully there, remains an imperative shaped by the cross and energised by the Resurrection.

As a semi-retired Christian minister, and a semi-retired theologian, I'm working out how to use my discretionary time, and finding I need quite a lot of, well, discretion. Much of the inner discussions taking place in my mind and in my heart just now are about a number of polarities and priorities, which can be reduced to saying yes, or no. Once you have discretionary time you find yourself choosing between alternatives, considering options, exploring opportunities, resisting temptations, accepting invitations, to do stuff, become involved, lend support or give time and effort to other people's projects, purposes and commitments. This is good, so long as I have some sense of purpose and commitment myself to guide the wisdom of that yes or the disappointments of that no.

In other words "semi-retirement" and "discretionary time" don't reduce the need for purpose and commitment as a Christian, if anything they intensify it. You don't serve God well by retiring from a responsible stewardship of gifts, experience and skills; nor do you live an obedient life by saying yes to everything you can do, dissipating life and energy in an orgy of self- affirming activity. So saying yes and no becomes a spiritual discipline of generosity tempered by obedience to God's call as we understand it now. Indeed choosing wisely where and why to invest time and energy has the potential to teach us to number our days, to not consider ourselves more highly than we ought, and still, in the third third of life, "to press on towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus my Lord".

Those words of Paul from Philippians in the Authorised Version, were learned by heart 47 years ago; they are my defining argument for resisting the idea of retirement. Yes a reduced level of remunerative employment; yes a relinquishing of high responsibility in ministry formation at a denominational level; yes a change of role and purpose appropriate to where life is now, and the person I now am. But each of these is not a disjunction of service nor  a discontinuity in vocation, but rather a renewed obedience to where and who God calls me to be now.

Now if you've stayed with this soliloquy till now, here I hope is the point. No matter what stage of life we've reached, the life defining questions for a Christian will always return to the radical centre of our faith and obedience, Jesus Christ. How to love and serve our Lord in ways more adequate to our gratitude, but always and inevitably inadequate to God's grace and love? Where to offer ourselves in Christ's name to others in community, whether in church, in neighbourhood, or in those ways of service that reach beyond and into the broken God-loved world and wounded lives? And why – why go on doing what we do in the third third of life? Because in one sense all our time is discretionary – obedience is to live towards Christ the centre. In another sense, "the love of Christ consrains us", and we gladly live as creatively as we can within that constraint.

For now I have three overlapping circles of family and friends, pastoral ministry in a local church, and ministry formation in the academy. That's enough to be going on with, and somewhere in the variable and unpredictable intersections of love that each produces, I hear the call of Christ and find a more perfect freedom.

(Three photos chosen at random, from places around where I now live, and move and have my being!)

Iona Version of St Patrick's Breastplate

Christ above us, Christ beneath us,
Christ beside us, Christ within us.
Invisible we see you, Christ above us.
With earthly eyes we see above us,
clouds or sunshine, grey or bright.
But with the eye of faith
we know you reign,
instinct in the sun ray,
speaking in the storm,
warming and moving all creation,
Christ above us….
Invisible we see you, Christ beneath us.
With earthly eyes we see beneath us
stones and dust and dross….
But with the eyes of faith,
we know you uphold.
In you all things consist and hang together.
The very atom is light energy,
the grass is vibrant,
the rocks pulsate.
All is in flux;
turn but a stone and an angel moves.
Underneath are the everlasting arms.
Unknowable we know you, Christ beneath us.
Inapprehensible we know you, Christ beside us.
With earthly eyes we see men and women,
exuberant or dull, tall or small.
But with the eye of faith,
we know you dwell in each.
You are imprisoned in the … dope fiend and the drunk,
dark in the dungeon, but you are there.
You are released, resplendent,
in the loving mother, . . . the passionate bride,
and in every sacrificial soul.
Inapprehensible we know you, Christ beside us.
Intangible, we touch you, Christ within us.
With earthly eyes we see ourselves,
dust of the dust, earth of the earth….
But with the eye of faith,
we know ourselves all girt about of eternal stuff,
our minds capable of Divinity,
our bodies groaning, waiting for the revealing,
our souls redeemed, renewed.
Intangible we touch you, Christ within us.
Christ above us, beneath us,
beside us, within us,
what need have we for temples made with hands?

(The photo and poem are shared from  Kenneth R Mackintosh's Facebook page over here.)

Bullying is an exercise of power by people whose own fears are projected onto others. Bullies are cowards, not only by picking on someone who is vulnerable, who can't hurt them back, but by running away from their own fears, and denying their own weakness by all this pretended strength. Bullies require the tolerance of others to get away with what they do. So when bullies get to work on someone there is an immediate challenge to those who witness it – be a bystander or be an advocate. By your silence allow another to suffer or by your words and actions intervene, intercede, interfere, in any case respond in support of the person bullied.

That's what happened at a Middle School Basketball game when a few members of the crowd started picking on a cheer leader who has Down Syndrome. You can read about it here. When a few tall teenagers call time out to confront the bullies, and protect the dignity and give confidence to their victim, something good and redemptive has happened.

I read this the day after the news of Jean Vanier having won the Templeton Prize. Few people have done more to affirm, uphold and champion the worth and dignity of each human being than Jean Vanier. Through his vision of communities where inclusion is the norm, love is the ethos, cherishing of each other is a shared presupposition, and people with disabilities are welcomed as people and invited to be full participants and shareholders in all the decisions and relationships that make community what it is – through that vision he has transformed thousands of lives.

And the transformation is multilateral. Those who come to care find themselves cared for; those who are being looked after become the carers of their carers. Yes, it is like that, a reciprocal exchange of shalom, a pervasive commitment to yes and affirmation, a consistent and persistent faithfulness in living together within and through the tensions of community. Here is Vanier's description of his own vision at its best:

Community is the place where each person grwos toward interior freedom. It is the place where individual conscience, unionwith God, awareness of love and capacity for gift and gratuity all grow. Community can never take precedence over individuals. In fact , its beauty and unity come from the radiance of each individual conscience, in its light, truth, love and free union with others. (Community and Growth, p 31)

This is a man who believes love is a gift, not a possession. A community is not there for itself but to serve a greater purpose, as a witness, a gift, to the poor, to humanity, to God. Vanier exemplifies that spirituality which is active, takes responsibility, is willingly accountable, but which grows out of contemplative prayer and making time and space within ourselves for God to touch and heal us by grace, to embrace and restore us by mercy, and to call us again to our deepest loves.

All of this grew out of Vanier's initial experiment of buying a cottage and inviting two or three people with learning disabilities and mental health issues to come and live together with him and a few others. Thus was born L'Arche, and the beginning of a network of refuge and restoration that now spans the world. Vanier's Catholic faith is not incidental to this – it is the essential core out of which he lives and dreams of rich life for others. The Templeton Prize recognises his achievement; characteristic of Vanier, he recognises the achievements of those thousands of people who live out their lives in commitment to communities where human beings are enabled, encouraged, supported and ultimately invited to flourish.