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Since my days as a young boy, walking the banks of the Nith in south Ayrshire, I've been fascinated by swans. To the child I was, swans were huge fabulous creatures. The first times I heard the whoosh of their wings as they took off, and flew overhead, I was in awe of their combination of beauty and power. Where we walk these days, there's a pair of resident wild swans. Occasionally they come over, keeping their distance, and perform what I can only call water ballet, graceful slow movement, effortless gliding, posture and head held just so.

As a theologian I have happily lived with the belief that beauty is its own argument for creative purpose, however conceived and expounded. I have little interest in an analysis of the concept of beauty when I stand beside a lochan and watch a swan embodying that elusive and very thing, beauty.

At least one starting point of reflection would be what any of us might make of the urgency and the urge to "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." A white swan, against dark water, in winter sunlight, makes a deep impression on the heart, so that I could as easily describe it as the holiness of beauty. Because those moments of aesthetic joy are their own form of inarticulate prayer, that need no words but simply turns us inside out in an embrace of a world where such moments happen, as pure gift and unexpected joy.

Keats' famous line, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," has its own truth, but that first moment of beauty perceived rebukes our emotional complacency and awakens in us a new hopefulness for a wounded world. To that extent, that first moment of perception, beauty can be the subtle call of God, a nudge towards looking for and living into the beauty of the world. 

But Keats is right. Beauty leaves a lingering legacy, a gift both of memory and the transformative impact of that moment when beauty ambushes us.

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

Some time in my fifties I discovered the poetry of Mary Oliver. She is a poet of nature, of the world around her. Many of her poems are about birds, which makes much of her poetry a form of literary ornithology.

Her descriptions are both observation of what the eyes see, and inner perception of what the heart feels. What the eyes see, the mind and heart consider, knowing this is a transformative moment of encounter with a hummingbird, an egret, a robin, wild geese, – or a swan.

In her poem, 'The Swan', Oliver laces together metaphors in an attempt to describe what is seen when a swan takes off, rises, and slowly recedes upwards and away. Only at the end of the poem does she raise the question that I think is a rhetorical question expecting the answer, "No. Not really."

The first line asks the only important question when beauty presents itself to us. "Did you see it?" From then on the whole poem is a series of questions, asked with the enthusiasm and persistence of one who has been captivated and needs to share the gift. She knows that beauty has the power to weave bonds out of shared experiences, gifts to us transcendent moments that transform the way we see the world, and each other. And that last line, with its interrogative mood, requiring of us an accountability before beauty; that question, and its answer, takes us back to the biblical command and invitation, "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."

                                               SWAN 

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? 

 

In his classic study of the Hebrew Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel deals with Jonah in less than two pages. But they are a clear lens through which to read the story of Jonah. His comments occur in his analysis of divine anger, (pp. 279-298) and in particular the contrast between God's anger which is but for a moment, and God's love which is from everlasting to everlasting. 

Here are several passages from Heschel which shed important rays of theological illumination on the dilemma of Jonah as he encounters the God who loves in freedom. The man who wrote this book, and this chapter on divine wrath, himself fled Nazi Germany, lost many of his family in the Holocaust, walked with Martin Luther King, and became an incendiary prophet whose outspokenness and passion for truth at times seemed to channel Amos, Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah. No wonder his book is a classic treatment of those prophets whose words were as fire in their bones, and who heard the word of the Lord and could not be silent. 

"This is the mysterious paradox of Hebrew faith: The All-Wise and Almighty may change a word that he proclaims. Man has the power to modify his design. Jeremiah had to be taught that God is greater than his decisions. The anger of the Lord is instrumental, hypothetical, conditional and subject to His will. Let the people modify their line of conduct and anger will disappear. Far from being an expression of 'petulant vindictiveness,' the message of anger includes a call to return and to be saved. The call of anger is a call to cancel anger. It is not an expression of irrational, sudden and instinctive excitement. , but a free and deliberate reaction of God's justice to what is wrong and evil. For all its intensity it may be averted by prayer. There is no divine anger for anger's sake. Its meaning is…instrumental:: to bring about repentance its purpose and consummation is its own disappearance." (Page 286)

"The contingency of anger is dramatized in the story of the prophet Jonah…God's change of mind displeased Jonah exceedingly. He had proclaimed the doom of Nineveh with a certainty, to the point of fixing the time, as an inexorable decree without qualification. But what transpired only proved the word of God was neither firm nor reliable…God's answer to Jonah stressing the supremacy of compassion, upsets the possibility of looking for a rational coherence of God's ways with the world. History would be more intelligible if God's word were the last word, final and unambiguous like a dogma or an unconditional decree. It would be easier if God's anger became effectively automatically: once wickedness had reached its full measure, punishment would destroy it. Yet, beyond justice and anger lies the mystery of compassion." (Page 286-7)

"God's anger is not a fundamental attribute, but a transient and reactive condition. It is a means of achieving 'the intents of His mind'. Inscrutable though it seems to the people in the end of days they will understand it clearly (Jer. 23.20)…The ancient conception that the gods are spiteful seems to linger on in the mind of modern man, and inevitably the words of the Hebrerw Bible are seen in the image of this conception. In gods who are spiteful, anger is a habit or a disposition. The prophets never speak of an angry God as if anger were his disposition. Even those who dwell more on His anger than on his mercy explicitly or implicitly accentuate the contrast. His anger passes, His love goers on for ever. "I have loved you with an everlasting love." (Jer. 31.3) Again and again we are told that God's love or kindness (hesed) goes on forever; we are never told that his anger goes on forever." (Page 288-9)

This is not Heschel going soft on justice, holiness and God's righteous anger. The entire discussion of anger is theologically charged by Heschel's conception of God as righteous love, patient mercy, and slowness to anger, but whose anger is the divine recoil from evil.

"No single attribute can convey the nature of God's relationship to man. Since justice is His nature, love, which would disregard the evil deeds of man, would contradict his nature. Because of His concern for man, His justice is tempered with mercy. Divine anger is not the antithesis of love, but its counterpart, a help to justice as demanded by true love. The end of sentimentality is the enfeeblement of truth and justice. It is divine anger that gives strength to God's truth and justice. There are moments in history when anger alone can conquer evil. It is after mildness and kindness have failed that anger is proclaimed." (Page 297) 

 

Apparently Erasmus wasn't kidding when he wrote, 'When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes'. I'm not quite as book mad as that, but on occasion I have been known to buy an expensive book.

In June 1991 a book was announced that at the time seemed, and was, an eye-watering price. This was before online comparisons and discounts. Understanding the Fourth Gospel by John Ashton was the first major survey and analysis of Johannine scholarship from Bultmann onwards. Published by Oxford University Press it was beautifully produced in hardback, at 600 pages, by a publishing house who produced amongst the finest examples of book-building and book-binding of volumes intended never to wear out. In 1991 it cost £65, today the equivalent of £177.

I ordered it and turned up at Blackwell's in Old Aberdeen with book tokens and a late birthday present, and came away happier than I ever did driving away a new car. So, yes, Erasmus wasn't far wrong about how priorities are quickly reshuffled when books enter the equation! (The current price of the extensively revised second edition from the publisher is £162, with a softcover at £37.99). For the avoidance of doubt, I would have bought the softcover if there had been one!

At College in the 1970's I worked through the Greek text of John's gospel under the guidance of R.E.O White, whose love of the Greek Testament was such that more than once he was accosted on the bus by someone reading over his shoulder and asking him what he was reading. He was never sure how far his enthusiasm for the Greek New Testament rubbed off on the enquirers. But it rubbed off on me. He passed that love of the NT text on to many of his students, myself included. I was captivated by his close exegesis and the wide range of secondary voices he introduced. Ever since I've tried to keep up with scholarly study of the Fourth Gospel, and that as a means to the end of preaching it well, and allowing it to be formative in my own spiritual life and practice. 

John Ashton's book found its place alongside Raymond Brown's 2 volume masterpiece in the Anchor Commentary; the three volume Schnackenburg which remains an intimidating invitation to dive in at the deep end; and C K Barrett, the commentary we used in college. I still have it, still consult it, and no other commentary has displaced it from that special place reserved for those books that were like a mountain to climb, but the view from the top made the effort worthwhile.

Monographs have kept coming and I have a selection that has grown slowly with the years. In close second to Ashton is my copy of John A T Robinson's The Priority of John, which I read throughout Lent in 1986. Bishop John Robinson is one of my heroes. He was a careful scholar, quite prepared to swim against the stream of the 'established' consensus in New Testament scholarship. His own spirituality was warm and enquiring, his intellectual honesty and learning beyond question. He was seriously and pastorally responsive to people struggling to make sense of the whole Christian thing in a secular society driven by consumer competitiveness and cultural flux in the second half of the 20th Century. 

His book on John is a remarkable piece of argumentation, based on careful if at times eccentric detective work. The Priority of John is theologically penetrating in his opening up of the passion story in John, one of the most moving sections of the book, given that Robinson was terminally ill during the writing of it. They were intended as the Bampton Lectures but were never delivered. 

There's much more on my John shelves, and they keep coming. But these two books, by two scholars called John, on a Gospel called John, are special. They are gifts to the church, and have been gifts to me in my own attempts at deep diving into the Fourth Gospel. With apologies to Erasmus, I'm glad that when I had a little money, I was able to buy and read them, and, with thanks to God, still have enough over for food and clothes.    

"As a student of theology, no one can and should do otherwise than keep enquiring after the true gospel, even more attentively and objectively, in ever more truth and love."

Bonhoeffer was saying farewell to the theological students in Berlin when he wrote this, prior to going to London to pastor two German churches. This short address is a passionate defence of theology and theologians as a calling essential to the life and future of the Church.

There was theological error, ecclesial compromise, a contamination of motive and a failure of vocational faithfulness in the German Church as it aligned its fortunes and future with the Nazi vision. Bonhoeffer was very clear that in the face of such false theology, theological faithfulness would require outspoken witness, and the cost and sacrifice of a true discipleship.

He urged theological students to go on doing good theology, enquiring after the true gospel. The theologian is not called to ecclesial politics and tactics. "The student of theology is the last one who should be thinking tactically and instead should carry on working with purely theological objectivity, in service to God." The theologian is called neither to loud protesting arguments nor clever tactical manoeuvres in church and state. "One should in such times, err on the side of being too quiet rather than too loud. Fore the false confidence of a loud voice has nothing to do with the assurance of repentance and the gospel."

Bonhoeffer himself would go against his own advice later when he became embroiled in precisely the machinations of a church in extremis, seeking to minimise the harm being done by his country's war machine in blind devotion to an ideology of death.

"Finally, one should know as a true theologian that, even where our knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ in its truth and purity keep us away from false doctrines, we stand beside our brethren who have wandered and been misled, sharing their guilt, interceding and praying for them., knowing that our own life depends, not on our better knowledge of being on the right side, but on forgiveness."

This is a call to radical discipleship, a blend of peace-making, truth telling, and gospel humility, each an essential in a true theologian. Those commitments of the theologian were carried forward and given firm biblical anchorage in his later writings, especially Life Together and Discipleship.

For now I read this short address and am astonished yet again at the prescience and theological instincts of Bonhoeffer. This was spoken to students when he was 27 years old, his country descending towards immense darkness, the church divided and confused and tempted by the idols of State prestige and power, his best efforts in the Church Struggle seeming ineffective; but he recognised that the gospel would require minds committed to truth, vocations faithful in their focus on the gospel and the health of the church, and for that the church needed theologians with a passion for Jesus Christ. 

"Theological students must learn and know that the driving force in their lives and thinking, as theologians, can only come from the passion of Jesus Christ, our crucified Lord. The study of theology cannot be conquered by the overflowing vitality of one's own passions; rather the real study of theologia sacra begins when in the midst of questioning and seeking human beings encounter the cross; when they recognize the endpoint of all their passions in the suffering of God at the hands of humankind and realize that their entire vitality stands under judgment."

This is about first loyalties in Christian discipleship for theologians. Truth and Love, and both as revealed in Jesus Christ and his gospel. The encounter with the cross is not a single moment, but a whole life commitment, an alignment of life purpose and theological vocation with "the suffering of God at the hands of humankind." Theological education is not neutral, but arises out of a commitment to truth and love as revealed in the gospel. And it may be costly and demanding, but it is in the service of a God whose suffering on the cross bears witness to the love and truth of God as eternal realities that have intersected with the world at its worst as redeeming and reconciling grace.

So Bonhoeffer concludes, "One should keep on, ever more undaunted and joyfully, becoming a theologian, speaking the truth in love." (Eph. 4.15)

All quotations are from 'What Should a Student of Theology So Today?", Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works (English Edition), London 1933-35. Vol. 12:432-435.

Monday 30 January

Ephesians 3.7 &14, 15 “I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of his power…For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.”

“For this reason I kneel…” What reason? Paul’s answer is the reason we all kneel before the Father – “the gift of God’s grace given us through the working of God’s power.” It’s a hard time to be a Christian in a world so broken. Yet by prayer and God’s grace we can have the same wide, generous, open-armed compassion for the world that brought Paul to his knees in prayer for the whole family of God, that is, every soul made in God’s image. By intercession we make ourselves conduits, sluices, through which God’s grace flows.

Tuesday 31 January

Ephesians 3.I6 “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being…”

When the problems of the world, and the worries of our own lives, and the anxiety felt by whole communities of our country – when these and much more drain us of energy, joy and hope, think of what Paul prayed for, and hear him praying it for you. Then make it your own prayer, now, here: Lord strengthen me with power through your Spirit in my inner being…”

Wednesday 01 February

Ephesians 3.17 “So that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith.”

By faith in Christ we are made one with the Saviour, drawn into the very life of God. Christ dwells in our hearts, the risen life of Christ is within us and strengthens us in our inner being. But more than that, Christ is in us and we are in Him, so that “our lives are hidden with Christ in God.” (Col 3.3) Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Thursday 02 February

Ephesians 3.17-18 “And I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep  is the love of Christ.”

Rooted is about being a tree with strong anchorage and full nourishment from deep roots. Established is about foundations, straight, true, sound, solid, and our foundation is the love of Christ. You can’t ever fully grasp the depth dimensions of God’s love in Christ; as well stand beneath Niagara with a bucket, or a thimble! Just stand under the deluge!

Friday 03 February

Ephesians 3.19 “And to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

To know what surpasses your knowledge, to understand the incomprehensible – that can only happen if God expands the horizons of our hearts and draws us ever more deeply into the mystery that Charles Wesley puzzled over and admitted defeat. “In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of love divine.” We’ll never understand until we are in heaven. Till then we wonder, and worship at the one who “emptied Himself of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race.” Amazing Love!

Saturday 04 February

Ephesians 3. 20 “Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…”

I don’t know about you but I can ask a lot, and I have quite a lively imagination. But they are not enough to outdo the One who is able to do immeasurably more than anything I can think of. We aren’t asked to be followers of Jesus in our own strength. Yes, at times it’s hard going, and we pray for strength, faith, help with hard decisions, and help for those we love – Remember, “He can do immeasurable more, and his power is at work within us.” We’re not on our own. We are in Christ, and He is in us, and as our Risen Lord it is his power that’s at work within us, renewing and reviving.

Sunday 05 February

Ephesians 3.21 “To Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever.”

This whole passage is like an illuminated manuscript that places the love of God in Christ against a shining gold foil background. And that dazzling gold highlights who God is towards us; Love. Love beyond our grasp but within our reach. Love that the baffles the mind, but which the heart recognises. Love deeper than any needs we could ever have. Love beyond our imagination, but nearer than our own hearts.

So we make Paul’s prayer our own: May Christ dwell in our hearts through faith, and may we be rooted and established in love, filled to the measure of the fullness of God.

At the far end of the beach at Banff, in Scotland, a small river finally reaches its destination. I walked here today and stood for a while enjoying the mid-afternoon light, the blue skies, the sound of waves as the tide turned, and the almost inaudible murmuring of the river as it emerged from the grass and met the cobbled slope, where it rushed towards the sea.

It's a favourite beach, but this part of the walk is less familiar. "All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they will return." (Ecclesiastes 1.7) I've often pondered these words, in the way you do when well written words don't immediately give up all of their meaning. Like many other sentences in Ecclesiastes, there are hidden depths in this image, suggesting constant motion, journey's culmination, and the cycle of rain, river and sea.

I stood for a few minutes gazing and listening, half thinking and half praying, the scene so obviously recollecting words that are meant to induce pondering and wondering. I knew why I had paused. The words of Ecclesiastes are an exact fit to the lovely serenity in front of me. It might be worth explaining why they came back to me so powerfully.  

The first sentence of Eccl. 1.7 was used by Elie Wiesel as the titles of his two volume autobiography, in my view one of the most important literary accounts of the Holocaust. Volume One of his memoir he titled All Rivers Run to the Sea, and Volume Two, And the Sea is Never Full. Wiesel survived Auschwitz and for the rest of his life he determined to tell the stories of those who perished there, and to bear witness through these stories and his own story to the truth, the reality, the factual inescapability of the Shoah.

As a Nobel Prize winning novelist, an essayist and journalist, Wiesel like Jeremiah the prophet, wrote to inform, to declare, to bear witness, to ensure that the truth would never be silenced, or forgotten, or denied. Two days ago in our different ways we marked Holocaust Memorial Day and yesterday I was reading about Elie Wiesel. And while standing by that lovely stream flowing out of the marsh into the sea, the words of Qoheleth came naturally to mind, towing with them memories of reading Wiesel's autobiography.

It was 1997. I was on holiday in Yorkshire National Park, near Goathland, in a lovely 19th C railway cottage beside the railway where every day a steam train passed. I was sitting under a tree, in a deck chair, beside the stream at the bottom of the garden, reading All Rivers Run to the Sea. The story had just reached the point where the chugging of the steam trains arriving at Auschwitz, and the screaming of the whistles, signalled arrival, with all the horror and terror that lay ahead.

And at that precise moment, in that eerie way that defies our most insistent common-sense, the Yorkshire steam train came under the bridge with a huge puff of white smoke and a loud whistle. I'm not sure I have ever fully recovered from that near numinous sense of fear and heightened awareness, as the world of 50 years earlier coincided with my immediate mental images of the book I was reading. What I do know is this; I can't read (or recall) that verse of the Bible without remembering that Tuesday afternoon, in July 1997, sitting beside a stream, reading under a tree, when Elie Wiesel's testimony was accompanied by sound effects choreographed by I'm not sure what – or whom. 

"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full." The writer of Ecclesiastes was too good a philosopher-preacher to indulge in frivolity for its own sake. And Elie Wiesel was too serious in his calling as survivor, storyteller and witness, and too burdened by memory of what happened to his people, to choose his book titles carelessly.

He doesn't explain his choice. As one who stood in that liminal space reserved for those whose life experiences make faith in God at times all but impossible, he stood in defiant trust; and as one for whom at other times faith was at least real enough to have an argument with a God in whose world Auschwitz happened, he stood his ground before God, albeit with his shoes off. 

For myself, I defer to a man whose humanity, was so deeply wounded and permanently formed by unimaginable suffering, both witnessed and experienced. Today's lovely walk, in a world beautiful and far removed from all the brokenness elsewhere, I was ambushed by a scene of a river and the sea, and by a memory of a book I once read, under a tree, beside a stream, alongside a railway.

"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they will return."