Jeremiah 17: 9

Christ Higham. ‘The Great Divide’. 

One of the passages from today’s first reading, Jeremiah 17: 9, first came to my attention when I was about 25 years old and it recurs to me fairly often. ‘More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it?’ Now the first half of the passage is variously translated, depending upon which Bible you use, and a brief perusal of some of the possibilities can be interesting: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.’ ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt.’ ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.’ ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and incurable in wickedness.’ ‘The heart is perverse above all things and unsearchable.’ These are just some of the ways translators have attempted to render the Hebrew, Greek, Latin or other text they were working from. Applying these attempts to our own experience of life can, and should be, quite an absorbing experience.

Part of the sense I get from all this is that the human heart is complex in the extreme. It is many-sided and full of twists and turns. This in itself need not be bad: God made us in his own image, after all, and our souls are to created to reflect in some sense the tremendous depths and beautiful heights of God himself. But we are fallen, too, because of sin, and one of the important things Lent calls us to reflect upon is the perverseness and deceitfulness of our own hearts, not only in how we relate to God, but also in how we relate to others and even to ourselves. How many of us have the courage really to do that?

Here is a fine quote from St. Isaac the Syrian, the 7th century mystic, which I think can provide a useful meditation for those who want to contemplate both the passage from Isaiah above and today’s Gospel reading from Luke concerning the rich man and Lazarus: ‘As for me, I would say that those being tormented in hell are done so by the blows of love. What is there more bitter and violent than love’s torments? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear a far greater condemnation in themselves than the most dreadful of punishments. The suffering that our sins against love put in the heart rends it far more than any other torment….By its very power love acts in two ways. It torment sinners just as, here below, it can happen that a friend torments a friend. And it gives joy in itself to those who have observed what should be done. This, according to my understanding, is what the torment of hell is: regret. But the souls of those above are intoxicated with delight.’ (from Discourses, 1st Series, no. 84)

 

 

The Ascent to Jerusalem

David Roberts. ‘Jerusalem in 1839’, lithograph on paper, 1840’s.

‘Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem.’ With these words from today’s Gospel (Matt. 20: 17-28), the Lord prepares his disciples for his passion, death and resurrection, which are about to occur. And for each individual Christian, the ascent to Jerusalem is a journey renewed each day, but especially during this holy season of the Great Fast: we strive to leave our sins behind and cooperate with God’s grace so that we may more quickly reach our goal. This is described vividly in Hebrews 12: 22-24: ‘But you are come to Mt. Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the church of the firstborn who are written in the heavens…’ We often read in the lives of the saints how they have burned with desire to reach the kingdom of God, whose citizens, at the deepest level of their souls, they know themselves to be. As a popular lay Catholic evangelist put it recently, when asked to describe the moment at which he converted to faith in Christ: ‘The scales fell from my eyes. I was liberated. I realized I was made for heaven.’

Meanwhile, however, we are in the world and it is our daily vocation to find God here, where he has placed us to find him. In the Old Testament, as the reading from St. Irenaeus from yesterday’s Office of Vigils points out, Moses was instructed to construct the earthly tabernacle in which sacrifice was to be offered according to the exact pattern of God’s own tabernacle in heaven. This was for the sake of God’s people: ‘He kept calling them to what was primary by means of what was secondary, that is, through foreshadowings to the reality, through things of time to the things of eternity, through things of the flesh to the things of the spirit, through earthly things to heavenly things. As he said to Moses: “You will fashion all things according to the pattern that you saw on the mountain.”‘ And all this is true for us as well. From the time we wake up in the morning, until the time we go to sleep at night, we are given countless opportunities to see the heavenly shining through the earthly, to realize that God is present everywhere, and that we are called to use and regard the things of earth in such a way that they will strengthen our faith and lead us ultimately to the heavenly life which lies beyond.

One of the saints commemorated in the Russian Orthodox and other Eastern jurisdictions today is St. Maron, a 5th century Syriac priest who spent most of his life as a hermit in extremely primitive conditions. He is one of the spiritual progenitors what is now the Maronite Church. What really interests me about St. Maron is this: in his highly ascetic monastic spirituality, he seems to have made little or no distinction between the physical and spiritual worlds. Indeed, he consciously sought out not only the quiet solitudes of the Syrian mountains, but a life in the open air in which he would be exposed to all the forces of nature, such as sun and rain, hail, wind and snow. He did not see these things as dangers or annoyances to be avoided, but as various means for deepening his faith and for crossing over into the spiritual world, that heavenly realm which he sought. And I think there is a lesson in this for us all: God has placed us in our current circumstances for a reason, and it is up to us to seek him wherever we are. Then let this be my prayer: ‘Lord, help me to seek and find you in the solitudes and in the storms, in the quiet and in the confusion, in the joys and tribulations. As I make my ascent to the Jerusalem on high. Amen.’

Whoever Exalts Himself

Hilandar Monastery, Mt. Athos, Greece.

One of the things our faith tradition warns us against repeatedly is the trap of having a one-dimensional attitude toward life. We see this attitude all around us: death means total oblivion for us as individuals, so let’s have as much fun as possible today; money allows me to indulge my appetites, so money is good and poverty is bad; Easter Week, with all the depth of meaning that term implies, is now simply ‘Spring Break’; ‘Merry Christmas’ has become flattened out into a generic ‘Season’s Greetings’; our thoughts and actions may lead to this or that result, but whatever moral value we place upon them is purely arbitrary and can have no profound or lasting effect upon ourselves or others; human beings are merely physical bodies with no ‘spiritual’ component whatever; an icon is nothing but a picture made of wood and paint; the so-called ‘saints’ are just a bunch of dead people whose lives have no relevance to us today. It is in such a context, with is really nothing new, that the Israelite prophets condemned the worship of idols, as they are described in this passage from Psalm 134: ‘The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths and do not speak; they have eyes and do not see; they have ears and do not hear, and there is no breath in their mouths. Those who make them will become like them, all who trust in them.’ A flat and one-dimensional attitude toward life, in other words. Idols of all kinds, whether manufactured or otherwise, are a perfect symbol for them: they are devoid of depth and of life. Lent calls us to discover whether we have adopted this attitude as our own.

‘Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.’ These words of Jesus from the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel represent the Lord’s effort to teach us a very different kind of attitude, a multi-dimensional one. Because the mere asking of the questions: ‘How will I be humbled if I exalt myself? How will I be exalted if I humble myself?’ will help me to take a very big step, a giant leap, really, toward going above and beyond the flat, insipid, one-dimensional attitude the world around me so often wants me to adopt. From there I can ask other questions: ‘How do my actions affect others?’ ‘How do they affect me?’ ‘Am I the slave of my desires and habits?’ ‘What will I do with this day, and with whatever time is left to me in this life?’ And of course Jesus’ teaching here, as always, is multi-dimensional in itself, and can have a very literal meaning as well: what seems utterly worthless to us is often most precious to God.

St. Simeon the Myrrh-Flowing, in the world a 12th century Serbian ruler named Stefan Nemanja, became a monk in extreme old age, first at the great Studenica Monastery in Serbia, then later joining his son St. Sava, first Archbishop of Serbia, at the Vatodpedi Monastery on Mt. Athos. When he was 84, his father-in-law, Byzantine Emperor Alexius III Angelos, gave Simeon the ruined Hilandar Monastery, which he proceeded to rebuild and endow as the center of the Serbian monastic presence on Mt. Athos. St. Simeon is known as one of the ‘myrrh-flowing’ saints because of the fragrant oil which even today is said to emerge from his relics. His feast day is today for those who follow the Julian calendar in use in the monasteries of Mt. Athos.

 

Judge Not

Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, in 1852. Lithograph on paper. 

This occurred to me one very cold wet and windy morning a couple of years ago while I was walking with my dog: when the Lord says to us, as he does in Luke 6: 36-38, ‘Judge not lest you be judged, forgive and you will be forgiven. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you’, then he means that quite literally. Even if the person I am judging has committed some very definite sin against me, and though I have been sinless in that person’s regard up to now, by the mere fact of judging I become guilty of sin, a direct and freely chosen disregard of the Lord’s own command. I have usurped the Lord’s right to judge and taken it upon myself. Why then should I doubt that God will judge me accordingly, and measure out to me the same measure I have used against others? 

Here is one of the other dangers involved in judging the behavior of others: we can spend so much time being obsessed with someone else’s failings that we fail to simply rejoice in the blessings of the day. And here’s another example from my own life. Seven or eight years ago, an elderly and very close friend of very long standing pulled dramatically and suddenly away from our friendship in a way which left me utterly bewildered. Eventually I made repeated requests to know what had happened, what I had done to offend, but was never given an answer or opportunity to so much as understand. Rather, what I perceived as a unilateral betrayal of a very trusted friendship simply deepened with time. And here’s the worst part: not only did I judge  that person harshly in my mind, but I became so upset and preoccupied with what had happened that for several years I really failed to welcome each day with a sense of deep gratitude for the blessings I still had. It was a case, in other words, of only learning half the lesson learned so well by Job: I knew that much had been taken, but I forgot about the much more which remained. In my case, it was a long otherwise golden period of peace and prosperity, and the last five years of my beloved dog’s life, which I failed to fully appreciate. I know this now, but came to the realization much too late. God gives us blessings which, however immense, in this life at least are usually quite limited in terms of time. 

Today is the feast of St. Tarasios, who served as Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 784 until his death on this date in 806. Among other things, he presided over the Seventh Ecumenical Council, or the Second Council of Nicaea, as it is also known, which condemned Iconoclasm and formally approved the veneration of icons in the year 787.

The Transfiguration of the Lord

Transfiguration Monastery, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. 13th-14th centuries.

More often in recent years I have noticed, among believers and unbelievers alike, a tendency to view and speak of death in one of two ways: it means either total oblivion (in which case it is to be postponed in favor of this world’s pleasures, but not worth worrying about beyond that), or it represents a natural transition from this life to some kind of undefined afterlife in which one will naturally be happy, see one’s friends again, live in a kind of pleasant ‘spirit world’, etc. Both these views seem logical enough in a kind of simplistic fashion, but I find them both too simplistic to be truly logical, and in any case utterly opposed to basic Christian belief as passed on to us in the apostolic and patristic tradition of which we are a part.

In the words of Psalm 26 which follows the first reading in today’s liturgy: ‘I believe that I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living.’ And here is my own peculiar kind of logic which I think would underly my approach even if death really did mean total oblivion: I would rather breathe my last believing that I would rest peacefully in the hands of a merciful God and awake on the joyful morning of the general resurrection to see my loved ones again and live with them forever in God’s presence. Because (and here is my peculiar logic again), if death were total oblivion, in my case it would only be so from the point of view of those who survived me. Once obliterated, I could have no consciousness of having been obliterated. All I would have would be the faith and hope with which I would breathe my last: the expectation of awakening to the joys of the kingdom. So I don’t see how I could ever throw in my lot with those who see only death and destruction at the end of the road. What a dismal way to view life, even if it were so! If that were one’s approach, who would ever set out upon any journey at all?

Meanwhile, today’s readings give us some tantalizing glimpses into what our life in heaven may entail. From Philippians 3: 20-21: ‘But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we also await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body, by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.’ And Luke 9:28-36 shows us that even now the righteous ‘dead’ (Moses and Elijah) are very much alive, and that, as members of Christ’s mystical body, our glorified body will in some way be like Jesus’ own as revealed on the mountain of the Transfiguration. ‘But,’ the non-believer will say, ‘how can I possibly believe that any of that could be true?’ While the believer’s experience is that, since his life has already been profoundly transformed and transfigured by life in Christ in this world, only a very tiny leap of faith is required to believe in the final perfection of that transfigured life in the life to come.

Love Your Enemies

The passages from Psalm 119 (118) which follow the reading from Deuteronomy in today’s liturgy are part of a very long meditation, the most extended in the entire Psalter, on the wisdom of following God’s commands and laws in every circumstance in our lives. Again and again this is brought home to us: the very insistence of the wording of the psalm seems designed by the Lord himself to overcome our own inclination to disregard the idea of obeying his laws when they conflict with our own personal habits and desires. But the inspired psalmist is in grave earnest when he says: ‘Blessed are they whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are they who observe his decrees, who seek him with all their heart.’ Unfortunately sinful human beings often find it irrational and illogical to keep to God’s laws, given to us partly in the Old Testament, and even more perfectly in the Gospel of Christ himself in the New, when it would seem in our own self interest to do exactly the opposite.

I have been rereading the ‘Meditations’ of William of St. Thierry, a 12th century Cistercian monk and mystic, who has this striking thing to say about the limits to using our reason and human understanding alone when it comes to trying to live a fervent life in Christ: ‘Neither does that understanding which, as a product of reason, has lower matters for its sphere of exercise, go any further than does reason’s self; it is as powerless as reason to attain to Thee. But the understanding which is from above carries the fragrance of its place of origin; there is nothing human in its operation, it is all divine. And where it is inpoured, it carries along with itself the faculties that are akin to it, the faculties, that is to say, that function independently of the inferior reason, except in so far as the obedience of faith requires its exercise…Thus the Spirit of the Lord of a sudden so clothes the tranquil, humble soul on whom He rests, and so changes him into another man.’*

Let us pray earnestly for the understanding which comes from above, then, so that we might truly put into practice what Jesus teaches us in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 5: 43-38: ‘But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.’ 

*From ‘The Meditations of William of St. Thierry’, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1954, pages 29-30.

The Lord is My Shepherd

Psalm 22, or Psalm 23 for those who do not follow the Septuagint and Vulgate numbering, is used in today’s Roman Rite liturgy after the short reading from the 1st Letter of Peter. It is one of the few scriptural passages known to most people who have any acquaintance with the Bible at all, and some of its verses are even known by heart by people who haven’t been in a church in years. Since the King James version has been so familiar to English-speakers for such a long time, I’d like to offer a few reflections using that text for my meditation. I find its wording particularly consoling.

And consolation is probably a word which occurs to most of us when we think of this psalm: consolation which we seek for ourselves. The psalm is replete with it, and if we read and focus on each line prayerfully, we will find many very specific reasons why we are urged by the psalmist to turn to God for guidance and reassurance in every era of our lives: when we are young and inexperienced and in desperate need of a holy and wholesome path to follow through the temptations and wrong turns we will encounter each day; in mid-life when, strong and in full possession of our bodily energies and powers, we face so many challenges and opportunities to use our talents for good or ill; in old age when, beset by illness and the onset of mental and physical decline, we more than ever need God’s reassurance that he will always be there to lead us on. It seems to me that this psalm is like a vast field in which immense treasures have been buried: in every direction, and however shallow or deep a hole you dig as you penetrate the text, you will find riches unexpected, and which will truly fill your cup until it overflows.

I’d like to offer this reflection too: Psalm 22 makes a fine meditation for those who wish to pray for the dead. Because not only does the psalm speak directly to them as well, but they are depending on us to remain with them faithfully, heart and soul, to accompany them spiritually on their final journey to God. This is particularly true in the days and weeks immediately following death, and there are many ancient practices related to this. But it need not stop there. Though the departed walk in the valley of the shadow of death, they need fear no evil, for Christ is with them and our hearts are with them too. His rod and his staff comfort them, and our prayers go before them too. His goodness and mercy follow them forever, and we who still await our own eternal repose can show goodness and mercy to our loved ones by not forgetting them in prayer. Until, by God’s grace, we come to dwell together in God’s house forever.

The Prophet Zechariah

Illustration from Spanish Cervera Bible, c. 1299.

Orthodox churches which follow the Julian calendar today venerate Zechariah, a 6th century B.C. Hebrew prophet and author of the biblical book which bears his name. He was of the tribe of Levi and may well have been a priest. It is possible that he was born in Babylon and was among the first group of those who returned to Jerusalem from the long Israelite captivity in that city. Zechariah is sometimes called the ‘Sickle-Seer’, because of his vision of a sickle flying through the air, destroying thieves and perjurers (Zech. 5: 1-3). To the Book of Zechariah belong prophecies of the coming of the Messiah, the entry of the Lord into Jerusalem on a donkey, the betrayal of the Lord for thirty pieces of silver, the purchase of the potter’s field, the piercing of Jesus’ side with a lance, the scattering of the apostles from the Garden of Gethsemane and the eclipse of the sun at the time of the crucifixion. The image shown at the top of this post, an illustration from the 13th century Spanish Cervera Bible, is of Zechariah’s vision of the ‘two anointed ones who stand before the Lord of all the earth’, represented as two olive trees supplying oil of anointing for a seven-branched candelabrum. Zechariah’s tomb is believed by some to have been discovered in the year 415, with the body of a child dressed in royal garb resting at the prophet’s feet. His relics were later transferred to the Church of St. James the Brother of the Lord in Constantinople. 

Today’s Gospel is Matthew 7: 7-12. Perhaps we often have recourse to this passage when we want to reassure ourselves that whatever we ask for God will give us. But what Jesus actually says is: ‘Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened unto you.’ He doesn’t specify what God will bestow. And perhaps this is the Lord’s way of telling us that we would never have asked or sought or knocked if God himself had not given us the grace to do this. In other words, we have already been given what our innermost self most deeply needs, which is faith in him, whatever he may choose to give us or withhold. Indeed the door has already begun to swing open wide before our hand ever reaches it to knock. 

Jonah 3: 1-10

16th century Russian Orthodox icon of the Prophet Jonah, from an iconostasis of the Kizhi Monastery, Karelia, Russia.

The prophet Jonah lived eight centuries before Christ. His first biblical appearance is in the 2nd Book of Kings, when he emerges as a prophet from a village a few miles north of Nazareth, where Jesus himself would later spend his childhood and youth. Jonah is venerated as a saint in some Christian communions–by the Russian Orthodox, for example, who keep his feast on September 22 according to the Julian calendar. He was not a Christian saint, of course, but a holy prophet of the Old Testament, and he prefigures Christ himself in various ways. In the Syriac and various other Oriental churches a three day fast is kept in memory of Jonah’s penitential mission to the Ninevites. Some churches in different Orthodox jurisdictions are named after him.

There are some very curious features to Jonah’s appearance in Nineveh, one of the greatest and largest cities of Middle Eastern antiquity. Archaeologists who have measured the ruins of Nineveh have determined that it would indeed have taken about three days to cover the city’s four major quarters on foot. And some patristic commentators on scripture tended to see these three days as references not only to Jonah’s own three days in the belly of the whale, but to Christ’s three days in the tomb and even to the Trinity itself. But it is the forty days which the Ninevites were given in which to repent which are perhaps most relevant to us in this great Lenten season which is upon us, for we too are given forty days in which to turn away from sin and to deepen our faith in the Gospel. Do we need more time than the Ninevites? They changed their ways radically on the first day Jonah preached to them, after all, and here we are a full seven days into our preparation for Easter! But there are some very good precedents for us which involve the number forty and the concept of testing: the Israelites were tested for forty years in the desert of Sinai before entering the promised land; Jesus was tempted for forty days in the wilderness after his baptism and before beginning his public ministry; the Church itself for more than two thousand years has kept these forty days as a necessary period of fasting, prayer and almsgiving before we may celebrate the mysteries of Easter. If Lent is a kind of desert, then that desert has been abundantly sanctified for us by Jonah, by the Ninevites, by the Israelites, by the Church, and ultimately by Christ himself. How will I conduct myself during my own desert journey?

One more brief note: in Nineveh even the animals, the sheep and oxen, were required to fast, to put on sackcloth, to observe a time of repentance. And I think this is to remind us of two things. One, that man is to get rid of his pride and arrogance: we are made in God’s image, but we are also part of a larger creation which we daily harm grievously through our sins. And two: we’re all in this together, and the rest of creation, which does not sin, is counting on us to reform our lives. As St. Paul says in Romans 8:19: ‘For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God.’

The Law of the Lord is Perfect

As usual, there are great riches in today’s mass readings, but I would like to focus on only one line, taken from Psalm 18, known as Psalm 19 in those translations which do not follow the Septuagint numbering system: ‘The law of the Lord is perfect, recreating the soul.’ When it comes to the scriptures, this is just the type of seemingly simple and ordinary line which can get completely ignored in favor of the dramatic Old Testament historical scenes and New Testament miracles and parables which of course otherwise rightly claim our attention. But all scripture has been given us for specific reasons.

‘The law of the Lord’, in the mind of the Old Testament author of this psalm, would have first of all referred that collection of hundreds of laws given to Moses on Mt. Sinai and which the people of Israel were bound by their covenant with God to observe. And this was not a matter of mere outward observance, because the Old Testament makes abundantly clear in repeated places how essential it was for the mind and heart of the faithful Israelite to be in harmony with the external actions which were connected with the keeping of the Mosaic law. That law was ‘perfect’, as the verse which is the subject of today’s meditation points out, and it had the power to ‘recreate’ the soul, or the essential inner person which God had created unique and unrepeatable. Parts of the Mosaic law have passed intact into the everyday practice of Christians (the Ten Commandments, for example), though Jesus’ perfect fulfilling of the entire body of the law is what has freed us from keeping all the hundreds of very exacting Jewish laws which were the test of a true Israelite’s fidelity to the covenant: Christ has already accomplished this for us, and this is part of the ‘sensus plenior’, or fuller understanding of the text, of which its original inspired author could hardly have been aware. And Christians believe that the law of God has been written indelibly in our hearts, partly because that’s how we were created, and partly because of our baptism into Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, however poorly we may live according to that indelibly written law at times.

This is what I would like to focus on, though: that law has the power to ‘recreate’ our souls. Now this word ‘recreate’ is variously translated, and some Bibles will by turns render it as ‘revive’, ‘remake’, ‘convert’, ‘reanimate’, etc. And the questions I will ask myself today are these: will I allow the law of the Lord which I find in the scriptures I read and hear preached, and which is written indelibly upon my heart in fulfillment of ancient prophecy, to recreate, revive, remake, convert and reanimate my soul? Am I prepared to have my interior furniture, as it were, moved around radically by the Lord to form an arrangement which is suited more perfectly to him rather than to me? And this will be my prayer: ‘O Father, recreate my soul with your perfect law, with every verse of scripture I meditate upon and with every commandment I keep, whose very keeping has the power, through your grace, to draw me ever more deeply into the divine life of the Holy Trinity itself as your adopted son, and to carry me ever closer to your kingdom.’