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Some Captions as Hermeneutic Suggestions.

"How come they didn't find my sword when they strip searched and jailed me?"

"My feet are killing me!"

"Come on think, think! What was that guy's name again, came from Philippi, begins with an E…"

"Wish they'd invent email and data sticks!"

"God, I need a good PA – I hate paperwork."

Happy to hear other caption suggestions for this painting.

……………….

The above is one of my favourite portraits of Paul the Apostle. Not the armour clad Caravaggio's muscle bound warrior, more the frail and hunted ageing apostle much less sure of himself. Is he ever going to leave prison – he doesn't know, so he has one sandal on and the other under his foot to keep it warm, how beautiful the feet that bring good news.

The books on his bed are almost as big as some recent works written about him by Jewett, Campbell and Wright! More seriously, this is the premier theologian of the nascent church thinking his way towards an adequate theology of the One he calls Lord; or maybe he's wondering just what he needs to write to those migraine inducing Corinthians whom he loves and longs to see grow up!

The sword, lying against those massive tomes, is no longer the persecutor's tool of trade, it is the Word of God, cruciform, the sword of the Spirit. He is blissfully unaware that his own face is radiated by the light of Jesus Christ, he is no longer lost, just lost in wonder, love and praise – even if his expression is a mixture of apprehension and contemplative puzzlement

The stylus is in his left hand – was Rembrandt left-handed, the most natural explanation for showing Paul like this. And the stylus is inactive, awaiting the clarity of thought that perhaps only an apostle who doesn't have delete and cut and paste has patience for, and therefore what is written has to be first thought, because papyrus and ink are unforgiving materials in the service of a forgiving Gospel.

What particular thought is he struggling with – Perhaps that moment of illumination when he, like the rest of us was unsure of God's purposes, and as he weighs the possibilities,  "For to me living is Christ, and dying is gain….I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you Philippians."

This portrait is of an apostle both vulnerable and uncertain, not a hint of self-confidence but somewhere deep in the heart's core, a love that inspired recklessness, persistence and some of the greatest thinking about God in Christ the church would ever know.

I like Isaac of Nineveh who said, "Be a herald of God's goodness". Against all preaching and announcing of life's negatives, this 7th Century Syrian Bishop insisted that the vocation of the follower of Jesus is to herald God's goodness.

Not that I've seriously read Isaac of Nineveh, but I've come across him now and then. Most recently in Olivier Clement's The Roots of Christian Mysticism, a catena of patristic texts threaded by Clement's commentary. I keep it handy because it provides food for rumination on any page I open.

In a chapter on the difficult love, that is the demand and cost of loving God and neighbour, Isaac is quoted to show that the Divine Love outshines and indeed overwhelms our own effort, and in doing so doesn't obliterate them but redeems them.

As a grain of sand does not balance a load of gold, so the effect of God's justice does not counterbalance His compassion.  As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of frail flesh as compared with God's providence and mercy. As a fountain that flows abundantly is not dammed by a handful of earth, so the mercy of the Creator is not vanquished by the wickedness of the creatures.

Now speaking of grains of sand – I recently bought this book as a visual tonic. The micro-photographs are amazing, exept our capacity to be amazed suffers from the deflation of that word being over-used.  Likewise the word awesome. But using the words without the downward drag of careless overuse, the photographs do cause what Arthur Quiller Couch calls 'cerebral inconveniences', and their beauty does hint at the transcendent – so yes, amazing, and awesome.

Now when I read about sand in the Bible I have a much richer sense of what a grain of sand looks like – and the individuality and beauty of each and every one of them – that;s another overused cliche, often used in churches, as we pray for 'each and every one of them'. But I can think of few better uses of the phrase than sich an inclusive set of brackets – each and every one. Maybe the one biblical text where grains of sand don't get such a good press is when foolish builders build houses, not on solid higher ground, but on flood plains!

Been thinking a bit about openness within the community of Christ. What kinds of relationship makes it possible for us to speak with each other trustfully and listen attentively? These essential presuppositions of mutual pastoral care and accompaniment are about our willingness to entrust ourselves to others, who also entrust themselves to us, in a relationship of mutual respectful love. Such New Testament imperatives as ‘bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ’, and ‘admonish one another in love’, require an openness of heart and spirit that is hard to manufacture, and grows within us only as we are open to the grace of Christ.

When Paul is having a hard time with the Corinthian community he urges them to open their hearts to him. For Paul Christian fellowship is only possible when generosity of heart issues in emotional and spiritual hospitality as we welcome one another as God in Christ welcomes each of us. Paul is not commending emotional exhibitionism, spiritual self-advertisement, or any other self-concerned form of ‘sharing’. He is rooting our care for each other in the compassionate competence of Christ, the sufficient grace of God, the enabling and transforming counsel of the Counsellor. Such open-hearted conversation enables each of us within the Christian community to speak and listen, and come to a new understanding of what it might mean to be heard, understood, and affirmed within the love of Christ.

A couple of recent encounters with folk have led to conversation about just how hard it is to follow after Christ, just to keep going, and to know that we are travelling in the right direction

De-motivation – what takes the wind out of our sails? Which of our recent experiences drained us of energy, eroded confidence, knocked our self-esteem – which is different from teaching us humility? Recognising and challenging de-motivators in us, and in others, is one of the first principles of a ministry of encouragementis important in sustaining our ministry.

Life Balance – Prioritising is an obvious way of managing conflicting demands. But who decides on the order of priority? Family; personal walk with God; wider ministry; ministry in the church; Sabbath; study versus people. How far would we trust someone to tell us we are unbalanced?

Hopes – ambition is not a bad word, unless it is an engine driving us along a self-chosen road. So what we hope for arises both from our identity and from our self-awareness. Talking of our hopes is an important way of articulating our faith – and of putting anxiety, fear and tedium into perspective. But who would we netrust with our hopes, and with the insight to guide us towards them?

These I think are crucial areas in which genuine spiritual accompaniment takes place within a discerning and wise sharing. When Paul speaks to the Corinthians about opening their hearts in affection towards him he is asking an awful lot; and so do we when we throw around that word, 'sharing'.

One of the benefits of a slim book, apart from economy of shelf space in a crowded study, is the ease with which it can be re-read, especially if first time round it was annotated. You'd think previous pencil footmarks and annotated fingerprints would be a distraction – it is if someone else did them. For me they always make me wonder why I thought that important enough to underline, annotate, not want to forget; and also to ask do I still think that? Colin Gunton's Christ and Creation, 126 pages of lucid reflection on two alpine doctrinal themes, is well worth re-reading, as I've just discovered. 

Freedom is not an absolute, but something exercised in relation to other persons, and that means in the first instance that it is the gift of the Spirit of God over against us, God in personal otherness enabling us to be free. It is in our relatedness that we are free or not, and this is true of all human life. (p55)

The self-emptying of the eternal Son in the incarnation and passion is an expression of the love of the triune God worked out in the structures of fallen time and space. (p88)

The church is thus the community where fallen forms of relationship are invalidated and outgrown; are unlearned through the grace of God and the work of the Spirit. It is important to remember that what is involved is not instant transformation, but a reordering of teleology or directedness. (p110)

Freedom, kenosis and community – now there are three areas crying out for serious consideration as validating criteria for Christian community which exists for the purposes of witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

On a sunny July afternoon, sitting under a plum tree, in a cottage garden near Goatland, Yorkshire, I was reading the first volume of an autobiography. A few yards away at the bottom of the garden, the stream chuckled and murmured, the small bird population was out and about, and it was a good day to be on holiday. Across the stream, the old railway line on which the steam train still ran twice a day, and a hundred yards away the railway bridge, its arches blackened by smoke, through which the train appeared still puffing out the smoke that immediately sent me back to a childhood in Ayrshire beside the main New Cumnock – Dumfries line.

That afternoon, in good time, the train could be heard chugging its way along the valley, and as it approached the bridge the whistle sounded. It was a moment of epiphany for me, a coincidence of sound, smell and sight which transformed what I was reading into words that became eerie and frightening, and resonant with a solemn awareness of life's ambiguity and tragedy I have hardly ever felt, before or since.

I was reading Elie Wiesel's newly published autobiography, All Rivers Rune to the Sea. I was reading, at the precise time the Yorkshire steam train approached the bridge, the paragraphs in which he recalls as a teenager, the sound of the train engines chugging, the whistles screaming, the clanking of the wagons, as trains left for Auschwitz. In Yorkshire, on holiday in sunshine,the picturesque reminded of the grotesque 60 years earlier in Poland. And did so with such force the memory remains vivid. That coincidence of my life with what I was reading of another's life, is fixed as one of those moments in life when truth penetrates well below the radar of rational control, and we are bereft of explanation. There is a mystery of human connectedness that just is, and we are not wrong in sensing the need for humility, and the risk that we stand on the brink of what is holy. 

In perhaps the most famous words Wiesel has written, seared in the minds of those who read them first in Night, Wiesel stated with adamantine intent, his life's work:

"Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

Holocaust Remembrance Day is as important as any other day in the Christian Calendar. It is a day to remember human capacity for evil, and for good. But actually, Wiesel does not see these two as the ultimate polarity. His experiences at Auschwitz showed him something much more sinister and corrosive of humanity, something that can ignore cruelty, smother compassion, approve atrocity, silence conscience, even re-set conscience to a default setting of complacency – he called it indifference.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

To play Mozart as the welcoming music at Auschwitz is a grotesque example of such indifference. At the heart of Christian civilisation mechanised murder was made possible, and human worth and value neutralised by ideology, and indifference to human consequences. This should never be forgotten. Wiesel is right, and has the right, in my view the absolute right, to require of the Christian church, a willingness to remember, to repent, and never to forget the consequences of a Christian theology laced with the toxins of anti-semitic rhetoric, co-opted by a state church in thrall to the political power brokers. Such thralldom is as far removed from the New Testament truth of the crucified Jewish Jesus, and the New Testament visions of the Church as the Body of Christ, as can be conceived by minds indifferent (Wiesel's word) to the message of reconciliation in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, and the realiry of the Messiah in whom the two become one.

The last words are from Elie Wiesel.

For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

“This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century — solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.”