Resurrection

I have just finished reading the recently-published volume 2 of the Pope's "Jesus of Nazareth" - and, by the way, you should read it, too! - and I was struck by something the Pope pointed out about the Resurrection of the Lord.

The Resurrection of Christ is physical.

Well, duh!  We Christians believe in the Resurrection of the Body, don't we?

Yes, of course we do.  It is, however, essential to bear in mind that the Resurrection is not simply resuscitation.  Lazarus, Jairus's daughter, the young man of Nain, were all resuscitated.  They were brought back to the ordinary life that we all live.  Eventually they died in the ordinary way.

The Resurrection of Christ, it is clear, is of another nature.  The Risen Lord appears in a locked room.  He disappears from the table after breaking bread with the two men in the inn at Emmaus.  He ascends into Heaven - whatever that is supposed to mean! - out of the sight of the Apostles on Ascension Thursday.  It is very easy for us unconsciously to feel - as the Apostles very consciously thought - that this is not really a physical being.  This is some sort of spook appearing as if physical.  This feeling is very stubborn in me.

This feeling is not surprising.  After all, my physical body cannot behave like this.  I have to unlock doors if I want to appear on the other side of them.  I have to get up and walk out of a room if I want to leave the table.  And the only way I am going to ascend into the heavens - much less into Heaven! - is courtesy of Air New Zealand or some similar agent.

Yet the Risen Christ is physical.  He demonstrates this to His disciples, after the pilgrims to Emmaus showed up back in Jerusalem (Luke 24:23-33):

Rising up there and then, they went back to Jerusalem, where they found the eleven apostles and their companions gathered together, now saying, The Lord has indeed risen, and has appeared to Simon. And they told the story of their encounter in the road, and how they recognized him when he broke bread.

While they were speaking of this, he himself stood in the midst of them, and said, Peace be upon you; it is myself, do not be afraid. They cowered down, full of terror, thinking that they were seeing an apparition. What, he said to them, are you dismayed? Whence come these surmises in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, to be assured that it is myself; touch me, and look; a spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see that I have. And as he spoke thus, he showed them his hands and his feet. Then, while they were still doubtful, and bewildered with joy, he asked them, Have you anything here to eat? So they put before him a piece of roast fish, and a honeycomb; and he took these and ate in their presence and shared his meal with them.

 This, then, this new order of physicality, is what the Sacraments are about.  God can, after all, give the new life as He pleases.  He does not need physical means - means, after all, strictly of the old physical order - with one exception - to bring about whatever change in our own being that is this new life - this eternal life.  There are, indeed, many groups of Christians who believe that the Sacraments have nothing to do with the life of God that, we hope, has begun in us, and will be in us - God grant it! - forever.  Yet most Christians - Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, most Lutherans and Anglicans - are sure that God's normal way of granting new life is through the Sacraments.  In baptism we are really regenerated - born again with a new nature, a nature that is not only able to empower us to resist sin and to work righteousness, but a new nature which, if we do not kill it by decisively turning away from God, will mean that we will live forever in the joy of Communion with Him - able to see Him as He is, and not only through the images of Him that created reality bring us.

There is one Sacrament which, we believe, is more than this.  There is one Sacrament that - physically! - actually brings this new divine life precisely into our physical bodies.  That is the Eucharist.  That is what is meant by the Church's teaching that the Eucharistic elements are, after Consecration, no longer bread and wine, though all their old creation behaviour is that of bread and wine.  They are now the Body and Blood of the Risen Lord.  Received with faith, they are what St Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to martyrdom in AD 108, called the 'medicine of immortality.'

Jesus said to them, Believe me when I tell you this; you can have no life in yourselves, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood. The man who eats my flesh and drinks my blood enjoys eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. My flesh is real food, my blood is real drink. He who eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, lives continually in me, and I in him. (John 6:53-56)

Faith

Recently, on a blog that I read fairly regularly, which is aimed at Catholic-Reformed dialogue (Called to Communion), someone posted:

How much do you think the “health and wealth gospel” can be attributed to penal substitutionary atonement soteriology fermenting in an affluent culture? While I think a lot of the wealth gospel crew are in it for the dough, I think a lot of them feel that prosperity is essential since poverty is a curse in the deuteronomic covenant and Christ became the curse for us. (“He who was rich became poor so that we who were poor might through his poverty become rich”- 2 Cor 8:9). Within a penal substitutionary atonement model, I think they aren’t being completely irrational.
I’d be interested in your professional thoughts.

The "penal substitutionary atonement soteriology" the writer is referring to means, roughly, the idea that:

• we sinned
• we owe the penalty for our sin, namely damnation
• Jesus paid the penalty on the Cross
• now our debt is paid

I do not at all wish to engage here in a Catholic-Protestant debate, but I confess this struck me quite powerfully about what I think is the fundamental difference between a certain outlook on the Atonement that I think of as Protestant, and what I think the Catholic view is.  Allowing that there is rather a continuum here - with the view I am calling Protestant being at one end, and the view I call Catholic at the other, though with individuals all over the map - I would express it in more or less epigrammatic form as:

To the Protestant, Jesus suffered and died so that we wouldn't have to.

To the Catholic, Jesus suffered and died so that we would be able to.

This is not, perhaps, the place to go into deep theology, but I think this explains quite a few criticisms by Protestants of the Catholic viewpoint.  For example:

• Jesus paid it all - why should there be Purgatory?
• Jesus paid it all - how can my good works contribute to my salvation?
• Jesus paid it all - how can I lose my salvation?

And many others.

Indeed, I would go further than the writer above.  If, indeed, Jesus paid it all - and if payment was the whole story - should not the curse of death be lifted?  And what we find in many strains of Protestantism is a strong attraction to Rapture-eschatology, and to an imminent return of Christ - so that, indeed, those of us who are left will not die.

I think the key to atonement is divine sonship - that we, by adoption, are sons of God.  In Christ - and with Christ in us - we do, indeed, participate in His Resurrection.  But our participation in Christ is in the whole Christ, not just the victory:

• We participate in His creative work in our own labour
• We participate in His Cross in our own suffering
• We participate in His obedience to His Father by our own deeds of righteousness
• Even in our sins, we are participating in His bearing of our sins on the Cross
• And in our daily rising to repentance, and ultimately to glory, we participate in His Resurrection

I do not think I am able to make this very clear - the idea is very deep.  It is nothing less than the doctrine that by faith we are enabled to live Christ's life on earth that we may reign with Him in glory.

To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:27)

Wish you could be there!

Just a little taste of the finale of the Tchaikovsky 5 - this is Bernstein conducting - not sure when it was played:

Time

About 3:30 this afternoon - Saturday 5th March - I am at rehearsal - Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony - we are messing about with the last movement, which requires a fair amount of intensity for the horn players.  My cellphone in my pocket gives a buzz - which only I notice :-) - and at a place where we have 16 bars to count I take it out and there is a message from Susan: "Ring me when you can - important."

So I know that my mother has died.

No, nothing preternatural, no instinctive knowledge, but I feel pretty sure that is what it is about.  I quickly text back "15 or 20 minutes," and continue playing.

In 2005 - don't remember the month, but I have an idea it was latish in the year - September, maybe? - Peter, my brother, tells me - on the 'phone, perhaps - that our mother is in bad shape, probably dying, and that if I want to see her, and if I can find the money for the trip, I should come now.  A bit of a look at the overdraught level and, yes, I think I had better go.  So I do.

She certainly seems in bad shape.  She is not very responsive.  She is on oxygen, needs constant care.  She is, at that time, just 90.  My dad, though a bit wobbly on his legs, due to a hip operation, is in pretty good shape, at 91.  I spend the week and a half there that I had time for, then returned home and to work.

October, 2006 - my brother calls me.  Dad has just died.  As I recall, he was just visiting his doctor, perhaps for a more or less routine checkup - and keeled over, dead.

So Dad, who is in fairly good shape for his age, is dead.  Mom, who is constantly in and out of danger, is still alive.

For the last six years, though, I have expected this moment, so it is not surprising that Sue's text means to me what it does.  And so the case is.  She had, I am told by various e-mails, been unable to eat anything for the last several days, and pretty unresponsive.  I don't know details yet, but Johnny, my son, says that he was told by Peter that my mother went into something like a coma maybe 24 hours before she died.

Cremation will happen shortly, I suppose.

And for the rest of us, time goes on.  I drive home from rehearsal, talking to Johnny on the cellphone.  There is dinner to be got this evening.  There will be rehearsal tomorrow, concerts next week-end.  My mother will no longer be concerned with such things.

So it will be for each of us, one day.  Time comes to an end.  The world will go one.  I do not know whether, dead, we will be aware of any of that.  If we are, it will be through our love for God, I think.

I have prayed for my mother every day since I have been a Christian.  I will go on praying for her.  I pray that that spark of love in her which I, as her son, knew and recognised, covered over though it sometimes was by her self-will and passionate, fiery, nature, will find its fulfilment and rest in the One towards Whom, even if not recognised, it was directed and intended.  Mom, may you find that rest that seemed often to elude you in life.  May the tears you shed for us be rewarded and dried in the peace that you needed, sought, fled from at times, but which - I pray - will be your home.  And may you be united, too, with those whom you loved who have gone before - my father, Jeremiah, your own mother and father, brothers and sister.

I will ask Father Peter to say Mass for you tomorrow, and on Monday, I will ask the priest at the Cathedral the same.

Lux aeterna luceat ea, et requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine

Three weeks

I may be a little spotty (which may mean 'silent') over the next three weeks.  It is concert time again.  Tomorrow, Saturday the 26th February, is our first rehearsal.  Sunday we will go up to see Eddie and Eveline and the kids.  The following week-end we have rehearsals both days; and the week after that rehearsals Thursday and Friday evening, and concerts both week-end days.

Many have asked about the Christchurch earthquake.  This was the second, of course - the first having occurred last September.  The second was, as the world now knows, more destructive, and involved (current count that I have heard) 113 deaths and some huge number of other miseries.  For those unclear about New Zealand geography, Auckland was not affected.  We are about 750Km away from Christchurch.

Something like this is stunning.  We are not, thank God, Haiti.  But this is us.  There really is nothing I can usefully say about it myself.  None of our friends have lost family, though some, at least, have lost homes.  The lunchtime Mass at the Auckland cathedral today was a special Mass for Christchurch.  The bishop was the celebrant.  We opened singing the 23rd Psalm - and closed with the national anthem.  It was not possible not to shed tears.

God have mercy on Christchurch.  God have mercy on Haiti.  God have mercy on Libya, on Palestine, on the whole of our aching, self-destructive world.

Vocation

Susan and I were married 20th May 1972, and in the summer - July, I think - we travelled to the mainland (from Hawai'i, where we lived) to visit a variety of persons - her mother and father, her uncle, aunt and cousins; her great-aunts and grandmother.  At the time of that trip I had been a Christian for about two and a half years.  Although I had begun my church-going in a Lutheran church, and was baptised there, we were by, I think, the end of 1970 or early 1971 attending a Baptist Church - International Baptist Church in Honolulu.  We had been married there, in fact, and many of our Christian friends were members.

Our trip took us to Portland, Oregon - the town where Sue had spent her early childhood, and where many of her relations lived - and whilst there I visited Western Conservative Baptist Seminary - now called just "Western Seminary" (I wonder if that means they are no longer conservative :-)) - with which I had corresponded from Hawai'i, asking about seminary education.  I planned to finish my PhD in linguistics at the University of Hawai'i, and then Susan and I would move to Portland where I would become a Baptist minister.  Talking with a man there cemented this idea in my mind.

In August, 1972, shortly after we had returned to Honolulu, I received a telegramme - a real paper telegramme! the only one I think I have ever seen - from Bruce Biggs, who had been a friend, teacher, and part-time employer at the University of Hawai'i, and was now Head of the Anthropology Department at the University of Auckland - saying that there was a three-year lectureship in linguistics open at the University of Auckland - would I like to apply for it?

Sue and I were quite distressed by this.  We had planned our move to Portland.  That move was attractive in a great many ways.  In addition to the fact that I was keen to be a pastor - God knows whether I would have been a good one, but I was keen, with new-convert zeal! - almost all of Susan's relations lived in the northwest United States, in Portland and in Seattle.  We believed we had discerned God's will in this matter.  Here comes this telegramme from out of the blue.

We went to talk with our pastor, Jim Cooke.  Somewhat disturbingly, he put the question back on us.  Quoting Psalm 37, verse 4:

Delight thyself also in the LORD: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.

"What," he asked, "is the desire of your heart?

Gee, thanks, Pastor Jim :-)

We decided that I would apply and see what happened.  On 2 February, 1973, we landed in Auckland.

'Vocation' means 'calling.'  God, we say, calls men to this or that.  I remember, when I was in process of becoming a Catholic, wondering about the 'call' that one heard people talk about - men being 'called' to the priesthood, men and women 'called' to 'religious life' (which I thought an odd term for living in a monastery - don't we all try to live religious lives??).  Did the people hear actual voices from God?  Was there a kind of certainty implanted in their minds?

I still wonder, because some - and not only Catholics - talk as though they did experience such a certainty.  Some, perhaps, even hear voices.  I have never had any such certainty of an external call - I have only, in each case, known what I wanted to do, even before I was a Christian:

• study astronomy (as a youth)
• marry Edna (1962)
• change to linguistics (1964)
• turn to Jesus (1970)
• marry Susan (1970 - though it took two more years to make it happen :-))
• take up the job lecturing in linguistics (1972)
• move to Yap to work on Yapese (1975)
• move back to New Zealand (1984 - but more on that below)
• become a Catholic (1994)
• be involved with Opus Dei (1997)

And no doubt other, lesser, 'calls' along the way.

It was that 1984 move back to New Zealand that prompted me to think of this post.  Because in that case, I was decidedly uncertain.  Indeed, I am quite sure that in great part my motives were selfish - therefore, at least in one sense, sinful.

When we moved to Yap in 1976, I was very much filled with the sense of God's calling for my life.  I was to be the great apostle to Yap (you know, converting all those heathen Catholics to the true Reformed faith :-)), and to be the Samuel Johnson/Noah Webster rolled into one, of Yapese lexicography.  I reflected on the providences of my life that had led to this calling.  I had myself done much toward making the job in Yap possible, for in 1975 I had spent two weeks in Yap talking about language work and it had been a result of that trip that had prompted the Yap Department of Education to bring me there to work.

The reasons why we left were several, but central to them had been the fact that I was doing less and less Yapese dictionary work, more and more computing for the Education Department - and I found, in fact, the computing work to be far more fascinating than the linguistic work.

Yet I know that I had somewhat of a bad conscience in leaving.  I told myself - and told some people in Yap - that in five years I would have persuaded my Reformed church in New Zealand to send me back to Yap to finish the Bible translation work that had been partly-, and well-, done by Sister Thieme and Sister Eberhardt of the Liebenzellermission.

This was certainly self-deception.  I could have known that the Reformed church in New Zealand was not going to work together with anything but a fully Reformed group in Yap - and there was no possibility of such a group being able to work in Yap.  The reality was that I wanted very badly to work in computing.  When, in 1983, a computing job was offered me, I accepted it.  We arrived back in New Zealand on our 12th wedding anniversary, 20th May 1984.

I tell the story in order to say what I believe - that God's calling to us works through our own choices - and even, at times, through our less-than-righteous choices.  The work I persuaded the Yap Department of Education to bring me there to do came to nothing in the end (at least as far as Yap is concerned.  I am working on trying to get the materials we produced onto the web for the use of linguists).  The idea that I would go back to Yap as a missionary was a sop I fed to my troubled conscience to excuse my following the 'desires of my heart.'

Yet it is transparently obvious that our situation in Yap was bad for us as a family.  Due in part to the isolation - and in far greater part to the religious isolation of my narrow Calvinism - my wife and children suffered, would, at least, have been badly served by being kept in that situation.

And far, far above any other benefit of our return to New Zealand, we were here brought to the Catholic Church, to the incomparable blessings of the fullness of the Gospel, of the Sacraments, of the Body of Christ.  It is, indeed, ironic that we left the mostly-Catholic island of Yap and returned to the once-mostly-Protestant-now-mostly-secularised New Zealand in order to find the Church.  Whether this would have been necessary is a meaningless question.  C. S. Lewis, in one of the Narnia books, has Aslan tell the children, "We are never told what would have been."  As the (very Calvinist :-)) Westminster Confession of Faith beautifully puts it:

God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass;⁹⁷⁸⁹⁷⁸Eph. i. 11; Rom. xi. 33; Heb. vi. 17; Rom. ix. 15,18. yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin,⁹⁷⁹⁹⁷⁹James i. 13,17; 1 John i. 5; [Am. ed. Eccl. vii. 29]. nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.

Or as St Paul puts it in Romans 11:29:

...the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.

My indecision and self-seeking in some of my 'callings' - seeking the 'desires of my heart' - have not always made me easy at mind.  This has been, in fact, because of the self-seeking.  But at bottom, we must decide - we must decide.  I do not doubt that God grants to some that certainty of mind, even those 'interior locutions' that are spoken of.  He does not lead most of us that way.  Rather, He wants us to love him above all thgs  Then the decisions we make will not make us unhappy (I John 4;18):

...perfect love casteth out fear.

In the words of Our Lord (Matthew 6:33):

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Thy will be done!

Church

Tomorrow Bishop Pat will - well, I don't know precisely what he will do - but in some official sense he will dedicate our new church building.  Will he consecrate it?  If so, does that mean it hasn't been a 'real' church until now?  We have, in fact, been having Mass there since the first Mass was said there on 31 October last year - well, in fact, a funeral was said in the partially-completed building some time before that.

So I don't exactly know what the Bishop will do, but whatever it is, he will do it tomorrow afternoon.

Does it matter?  Certainly I do not think the church was dedicated or consecrated or anything special at all last year at that funeral Mass.  The reason the funeral was held inside the now-roofed but still un-walled building was that it was the funeral of Henk van Lieshout, whose labour had been a prime mover in getting the church building project going, keeping it going - and who had suddenly died of a heart attack before the church could start being used for regular Masses.  It was wonderfully right that his funeral should have been in the building he had loved into existence.

But that building was certainly not a consecrated (or dedicated, or whatever) church at the time.  And at different times in the past we have had Mass out of doors; once in a gymnasium; for nearly a year in the church hall.  Mass is Mass.  The world is the Lord's and the fulness thereof.  Mass does not require a special building.

Nevertheless, the consecration makes a difference.

John Henry Newman, in his attempt to justify the via media - the Anglican Church as a 'middle way' between Protestantism and Catholicism - said that his religion was founded on three principles:

1. The dogmatic principle - that religious truth could be known with certainty; that certain things were true and their contraries false; that religious truth did not all reduce to matters of private opinion;
2. The sacramental principle - in his words: the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen.
3. Anti-Romanism.

The third principle had necessarily to abandoned when he became a (Roman) Catholic!  The first, of course, did not.

And neither did the second.

Was it Max Weber who said that Protestantism, and particularly Calvinism, desacralised the world?

It didn't work - as anyone who contemplates the rather more emotional side of modern environmentalism can testify.

Man is a natural priest.  He is that strange centaur-like creature, part god, part beast, who connects the material and spiritual worlds.  This is unavoidable, and hence, when not guided by reason and revelation, man finds his own way of being the junction, the seam, that joins Heaven and Earth.  I recall something from Kroeber's book Ishi - Ishi, she said, was very religious, leaving tobacco around in various places.  This was very natural.  This was the sacramental principle.

Our church is more than timber and cladding, steel and paint.  It is a House of God.  It matters to us humans that we are physical as well as spiritual.  In my last months in the Reformed Church, during 1994, when I suspected that I would have to become a Catholic, I began to have a longing to be able to kneel in prayer - rather than simply sitting as we did.  I spoke once with one of our elders, after we had announced our intention to become Catholics, about the bareness of the building we used in Reformed worship.  He said that he greatly appreciated the austerity - he wanted nothing between him and God.  This is quite right, too.  In the sacramental principle lies always the danger of idolatry - of mistaking the means for the end.  That is so, and the Catholic Church is very much aware of it.  Yet I think the behaviour of wandering modern man - whether the environmentalist, the New Age adherent, or simply the ordinary person whose car, computer, or boat acquires more than merely utilitarian value - the behaviour of all these shows the fact that you cannot deprive man of the sacraments.  One way or another, he will have them.

God knows what is safe for us, and thus He gives us the Sacraments of Baptism, of the Eucharist, of Confession, and the others, as the roads to Heaven.

And He encourages us to house them in a house devoted to Him, one in which He lives especially and waits for us.