07.11.04 Steve More mystified than mystic Lk 20:27-38 / Job 19:23-27
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Whole devotional traditions have been evolved around Jesus' last word - the seven last words of Christ from the cross. This week I read a list of some famous people's last words. My favourite was the last words of Oscar Wilde - "Either this wallpaper goes, or I do" - partly because it seems terribly impressive to manage to be witty with your last breath (even if you planned it in advance - how do you know which of your last breaths are infact going to be the last one?) - and partly because it's the kind of pedantic sentiment (not liking the wallpaper) that I all too often recognise in myself....
It's frustrating that the older you get, and the more experienced you become generally, the more blocks you've been around, the more places you've lived.... that still there's no end to the number and quality of things that you just don't understand.... (I realise I may just be speaking for myself here). These range from people's mysterious taste in wallpaper, to:
- why otherwise intelligent overseas students don't realise that it's uncool to wear branded University of Edinburgh sweat shirts
- why sofas 'especially styled for DFS by Linda Barker' can be so blindingly gruesome
- why so many people are so beguiled by the spurious thrill of fireworks that they can't resist sending their money up in smoke with a bang days or weeks before the designated 'burn your money for the small thrill of a sparkly bang day'
- why very sweet people who love each other dearly can grow to hate each other
- why it's the good people who get ill - the innocent who suffer
- all the way through to why 50 million Americans can vote to re-elect a government whose 'big dog' foreign policies seem so blatently imperialistic, and whose domestic policy so blatently anti communitarian.... (not that I'm sitting on the fence on this one).
I really am mystified. Indeed I had what the Guardian called 'the Bush blues' this week. The 'extra' four million voters who registered and turned out this time had mainly been Republicans. They had been lying low, refusing to tell the pollsters which way they planned to vote, and for them the real issues had been President Bush's opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Exit polls showed that the stances of the two candidates on moral questions like these were the deciding factor for 22% of voters, the largest single influence on the way people voted.
Thus, after all the angst about the war in Iraq, international terrorism etc, it seems that the future leadership of the world's most powerful country was decided on the basis of what each candidate said about certain moral issues - and different interpretations of biblical teaching within various parts of the American church had a strong influence on this year's campaign.
On a personal level, I found the whole concept of Christianity being wielded by Bush as his justification and guiding star, quite disarming. In the face of this phenomemon - it's tempting to feel one's whole faith foundation crumbling - if my world view, and my Christian faith so different from that - it must mean that everything is entirely subjective? Is this Christianity, and is this Western civilisation? - because if it is, then - stop the bus - I want to get off.
Maybe you know the feeling. Today's Bible passages are all about folk who feel similarly thwarted.
The Psalmist feels blighted by injustice and feels threatened by the outside world - the heart-breaking cry of the ages - 'why do the wicked prosper, O God' (Hear a just cause O Lord..... read it through)
Job is the victim of underserved suffering which he cannot explain.
Jesus is confronted by the hugely powerful religious and political heavyweights of his day - a system that must have seemed deeply depressing in how far it had evolved away from the love and compassion of the creator God.
In this case the Sadducees, a priestly group who did not believe in resurrection after death, put the question. The moral issue they concocted, as to which partner a person who had remarried after widowhood would have at the final Resurrection, was clearly hypothetical. It was not the sort of thing anyone was likely to lie awake worrying about in the middle of the night. Yet Jesus knew it needed an answer that tackled the underlying problem of whether people felt God left them excluded or included.
Having begun his answer by saying that resurrection life didn't recognise the institution of marriage anyway, he tried to show them what really matters in God's eyes: 'he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.' A continuity between this life and the next......one of the mysteries of our faith.
We often think of our Christian faith as an encounter with mystery - mysterium fidei - the mystery of faith...the mystery of God. If you'll forgive me a rather tenous connection....I hadn't thought much before about how this might include the concept of the believer being mysti-fied. But Christian history must be full of 'the faithful community of the mystified'. Being mystified about the world and the apparent randomness of our part in it is a major motivation for religious belief generally, after all. I like to think there were loads of thoughtful Christians who were mystified by and vehemently opposed to the Crusades (maybe someone can help me there). We know that lots of Christians, mystified by the churches collusion, openly opposed the Third Reich - and paid the price. We know that when the church colluded in slavery, or in aparteid - when those had overwhelming popular and powerful political weight - there were faithful people who continued to burn as lights in the darkness, for years and years.
Even those who walked closely with Jesus were mystified a lot of the time. Constantly misunderstanding his real motivations and intentions. How hard it must have been for them to build and build their hopes as he travelled and ministered and finally penetrated the corridors of power, this country boy from the sticks, finally riding triumphantly into the city - and then a few hours later for the whole enterprise to lay in tatters (like those shots you may have seen of deserted offices of the Democratic Party with a few activists, head in hands - years of work in tatters). And how that experience - of mystification in its utterness - informed the experience they described as resurrection - a humbled determination to live out the love of Christ that was so convincing it revolutionised the known world.
Perhaps its when Christians are not mystified that things go wrong. Perhaps where there's no mystification, there's certainty. Where there's certainty there's dogma. Where there's dogma, there's judgement. Where there's judgement, there's division. Etc etc .......
There was a gloomy nineteenth century philosopher called Arthur Schopenhauer, who, nonetheless once wrote that “The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him" (we'll forgive him his sexism). And talking of intelligence.....
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science” Albert Einstein
And actually - I have to remind myself - about another 50 million Americans voted the other way.......