Tag Archives: Christian faith

As Lent approaches

11 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Lent

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Lent is a chance to reassess where we are; a time of penance.

If press of business at work was the primary reason to refrain from blogging, there was a secondary one. It seemed impossible to blog and remain spiritually calm. The invasion of modern culture wars into the realm of religion was inevitable, but becomes wearing to one who finds it difficult to define himself in those terms.

At the heart of my own faith is the encounter with Christ in the Eucharist. That is the Christ who I encounter in the Holy Scriptures, who tells us that we will eat of His body and drink of His blood, and that He is the Way, the Truth and the Light. Were that not the case then there would be a disconnect between reason and experience, and my own Christianity rests on those two pillars- reason and experience. But these two are mediated through the Church and its traditions. I do not understand these things solely by the light of my own reason, although I constantly test them against it; I am part of a living tradition. I am but one of a great cloud of witnesses.

The spoken Word matters to me a great deal. Without Scripture I would be lost. But to interpret it by the sole light of my own reason would also be to risk becoming lost. Christ became man so that I, like other sinners, might receive life, and life eternal. My experience tells me that the Christ of Scripture is the one I encounter at the Eucharist; the Church reinforces that and provides me with a sacramental understanding of what, and who, I have received; it is a memorial of His saving Passion; but it is Him too not simply a memorial. I know this through what I feel; but I find reinforcement and validation for what I feel in the tradition and teaching of the Church.

Modern critical theorists of Scripture made the attempt to make it conform to their own limited, non-sacramental understanding of the world; ruling out miracles on the a priori ground that they could not exist. That was to insert one’s own understanding in place of that of the Church, which has always had the humility to accept what the Scripture it received described; it does not attempt to know better than the eye-witnesses. One’s unaided understanding might lead one astray. Had the Lord Jesus wished us to get our teaching about Him from a book alone, then undoubtedly He could have written that book. Instead He inspired His followers to write and collect what was written, providing, through the Church He founded, an infallible interpreter in cases of doubt.

In all of that, there is for me, only one culture war – that of the World against that of the Church. Of the mystery of the existence of many churches, I have no opinion. I have met better men and women than myself in many other Churches, and I leave any verdict on their ultimate fate where it belongs, with the Only Just Judge. I observe, with no further comment, that there are Anglicans and Orthodox with whom I have more in common than some Catholics I know. We share the characteristic of trying to balance faith, reason and tradition, and of not trying to give priority to whatsoever might be novel, whilst, at the same time, not turning our face against the fact that Spirit is at work in the Church

As I prepare for Lent, I am drawn back to this place and to the fellowship it provides.

The family circle of Jesus of Nazareth

11 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith

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Mary of Clopas

The last post tried to show who Mary of Clopas was and what she told us about Jesus. It argued that an examination of her story revealed that He had an extended family, two of whom became followers and wrote Epistles, and two of whom became bishops of Jerusalem. Here, I want to explore the family circle in a little more detail. Sometimes, based on one or two passages, the impression is given that Jesus’ own family rejected him, but if we examine the Gospels in more detail, we shall see how false such an image is.

If we start with ‘Salome’, whom St Mark identifies as standing by the Cross at Golgotha, and who goes to the tomb on that first Easter morning; who is she? St Matthew calls her ‘the mother of Zebedee’s sons, whilst John calls her the sister of the mother of Jesus. Thus, Salome was the aunt of Jesus and she was also the mother of two of the disciples, James and John – who were therefore first cousins to Jesus. We know that family ran a fishing business down in Capernum and that it was thence that Jesus went after John the Baptist had been executed; this suggests Jesus knew them well enough to go to live with them. We can perhaps begin to understand why John was the ‘beloved disciple’. If, as tradition has it, he was the youngest of the Apostles, then he may well have been very close to his older cousin, who, in turn, may have treated him as he would a younger brother. It also helps explain why Salome thought she could ask for her sons to be at His right  and left hands in the world to come.

Although historians have tended to treat the Apostles and Jesus as unlettered men, there is no evidence for this.  Zebedee clearly ran a successful fishing business, and someone would have been required to keep track of the profits and organise the trade with Jerusalem, about eighty miles away. We are told that that young John was ‘known to the high priest’, indeed, so much so that he was able to go into the house on that first Good Friday, and to get Peter into the house too. We also know John had a house in Jerusalem to which he took the Blessed Virgin after the crucifixion.

Two sorts of explanations have been offered for this. Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History vol III, chapter 24) describes him thus:  ‘John, who was both a witness and a teacher, who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord, and, being a priest, wore the sacerdotal plate.’ This, Eusebuis attributes to Polycrates, who was bishop of Ephesus at the end of the second century. It is not out of the question that John could have been a priest. Luke tells us that Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, was a ‘daughter of Aaron’, and it might well have been that Salome was another such. John certainly seems to have had a detailed knowledge of Jerusalem and the Temple complex.

The other tradition is more prosaic and may be truer to life – which is that John was the man who dealt with the Temple complex as part of the family business. There is a tantalising mention in the apochryphal Gospel of the Nazarenes which states that John ‘often brought fish to the palace of the high priest’, thus conjuring up the image of the beloved disciple as fish-wholesaler to the Pharisees.

We often tend to think about Our Lord as an isolated figure, but the more we delve into it, the clearer it comes that His mother Mary’s family, and that of his foster-father Joseph, provided him with a typically Jewish extended family, many of whom followed their cousin into the new line of work.

The Way

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Blogging, Faith

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It is a joy to have the Rev. Malcolm back with us. This blog was started by an Anglican laywoman, and since her retirement from blogging, we have missed that irenic Anglican voice – and have been much the worse for it. One of the pleasures of having Malcolm back with us is that his posts breathe the air of a Christian who is on the journey we are all on, and who is capable of standing back and reflecting on the experience in a way that helps us all.

His most recent post, Journeying is a perfect example of his reflective writing. He does not shy away from using words like ‘doubt’ and ‘uncertainty’, and when he writes:

One has to be suspicious of individuals who think they have everything worked out, because invariably they haven’t. There is an un predictability about life that is valuable

I sympathise. As Malcolm says, life is more complex than any set of rules and regulations can encompass, and we need, always, to remember that the Sabbath was made for man and not the other way round. Repentance is a crucial part of the Way, for sure, but we must not not make the yoke of regretfulness heavier. There may be fortunate people who, after they have confessed and been absolved, can consign the burdens of past sins to the scrapheap of their own history, but for those of us not granted such Grace, we need to be able to look ahead and set our face to the far horizon.

It is not for nothing that Christianity was first called ‘the Way’. For all the certainties sometimes enunciated by those who feel ‘once saved. always saved’, for myself, and for others I know, our faith is a journey – it is a way we are treading. We know where it leads, but to continue to tread the way requires, as Malcolm has pointed out, faith. The Lord seems to my mind to promise us a reward for our faith in Him; He does not promise us a reward for our certainty. Blessed are those who, having seen, believe, of course, but it seems to me that those who believe through faith are also blessed – and it is harder to have faith than to have certainty. It is there, I sometimes think, that the sort of certainties put out by those such as our friend here, Bosco, are of far less help to the Christian and to the seeker than the language employed by Malcolm.

Saying, ‘all you have to do is knock’ is all very well, but what about those who have knocked until their hands and heads hurt? One answer would be the one offered in classic Calvinism – you are simply not one of the elect, Jesus did not die for you. That is an honest answer to the enquirer and the seeker who has not found answers, but is it consonant with the tenor of the teaching of Jesus? Whenever He encounters faith, he praises it, but it is plain to see that faith is not the same as certainty. The Roman Centurion has faith that Jesus can cure his servant, but that is not because he knows who Jesus is, or because he is certain from past knowledge of Jesus; he simply has faith in the authority he sees in Jesus.

Malcolm makes a profound point when he writes: ‘Real faith is about trust and not certainty’. The Way is long and it is winding, and sometimes it seems uphill all the way. But the alternative would be to abandon it – and faith says ‘no’ to that. Lord, help though my unbelief and see me safe to the harbour at the end.

Christians fear to declare faith

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Church/State, Faith

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That was the dramatic headline in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph. Apparently, 50% of all the respondants to the question ‘Do you agree/disagree that Christians are afraid to express their belieds because of the rise of religious fundamentalism?’ agreed; 63% of ‘practising Christians’ agreed, as did 61% of ‘non-practising Christians’; only 40% of non-Christians agreed, but then 20% didn’t know, and probably found the question a bit odd, as I do myself. But it is hard not to agree with baroness Warsi when she says:

Its when countries have a weak identity that things start to go wrong and people start to feel threatened. Sadly, that’s what’s happened in Britain for many years. Politicians didn’t talk about their faith because they were seen to be odd to do so.

I am not so sure about the last point, politicians are pretty odd anyway, and I’ve not men one who was worried about appearing odder because of his faith; I suspect it is simply that most of them don’t have any faith. The day when MPs were drawn from a cross-section of the upper middle classes with a few working-class fellows thrown in, have long gone, and most of them seem to have gone to the same set of schools and universities and have done nothing outside politics; not, I think, something likely to produce too many folk with an active Christian faith.

I gather that Lord Wiliams of Oystermouth (Rowan Williams either has a marvelous sense of humour or none at at all, choosing that name for this peerage) thinks we are now a ‘post-Christian country’, and there is much in that, although I can’t forbear to ask what the Established Church, which he led for a decade, did to arrest that process? It seems from my Baptist perch that too many of its clergy aided it with talk about not believing in the ‘literal resurrection’ (so what was it Thomas saw, a ghost have these folk actually read John 20, or do they think it a ‘myth’?) and the Virgin Birth. He’s right that the ‘cultural memory’ of Christianity is ‘quite strong’, but unless he, like the rest of us, get on with evangelising, then that memory will weaken.

It was encouraging to read what Jessica has been writing about how folk get introduced to the Faith. Lord Williams commented that at least children wouldn’t find Christianity boring old familiar stuff. At one level, good, at another, unless they get introduced to it by someone at some level, then they’re not going to know anything about it. Or schools seem to me to be a lost cause, so that does leave it down to the churches. The question I would ask every church is what are you doing to spread the Gospel? This begins with each of us. We are all instruments of the Holy Spirit. It s easy to condemn schools and other educational institutions, as though someone other than committed Christians is responsible for spreading the Good News; but they aren’t, you are, I am, and how’re we doing – not too well.