Mary, Martha and the “double-bind”

John H Monday 19th July, AD 2010

Yesterday’s gospel reading was the account of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42.

I get the feeling this story is read very differently by men and women. In particular, my impression is that women tend to be rather more keenly aware than men of the double-bind with which this account (or at least, its usual interpretation and application) presents them.

We all know how it goes: Martha is the one following the way of Law, of good works, of resentfully self-righteous effort. Mary is the one following the way of Gospel, of receiving the word of Jesus passively and in faith. Mary has “chosen the better part”, so let’s be more like Mary and less like Martha.

Which is great. Except, looking at our churches, which model are women (in particular) really encouraged to follow? Which of those two sisters is closer to the prevailing ideal of the “good Christian woman”? More to the point, if Christian women decided, wholesale, to follow literally the injunction to emulate Mary rather than Martha, how long would our churches continue to function? Be honest!

Even in the immediate context of the worship service (which Revd Tapani Simojoki’s otherwise excellent sermon yesterday emphasises as the place for us to emulate Mary), it’s all very well saying:

…you can just sit there and do nothing. Nothing at all. Just receive: receive His forgiveness, receive His promises, receive His salvation…

but someone’s got to be making the tea for after the service, and running the creche, and leading the children’s activities in the hall, and chances are that the people doing so are mostly going to be women – while the men “choose the better part” and sit in the sanctuary in perfect imitation of Mary.

Hence the double bind. The church spends most of its time telling women (either explicitly or, more often, by implication) that it needs them to “get busy”. Women who try to restrict their involvement in church activities (perhaps, to choose a random example, because they have only just enough energy to deal with three lively children all week) can be left feeling like second-class citizens who are “letting the side down”.

Then, once every three years, Luke 10:38-42 rolls round again and we get to pull the rug from under the feet of our “Marthas” by telling them that they’ve been doing it all wrong. Oh, but would you mind passing me another of those biscuits? Thanks!

That’s the double-bind: “Be like Martha” – “Don’t be like Martha”.

What I would love would be some pointers to sermons, essays or other interpretations (preferably, but not necessarily, from a Lutheran perspective) that both recognise, and provide an escape from, this double bind.

Over to you!

The Girard Samaritan

John H Monday 12th July, AD 2010

As the comments to my previous post demonstrate, the parable of the good Samaritan can be read in a number of ways: Jesus as the Samaritan or the victim by the side of the road, us as the victim and/or the Samaritan and/or the innkeeper, and so on.

These multiple readings are by no means contradictory or exclusive of one another. Indeed, they are themselves a key part of its teaching. However, they can begin to appear slightly chaotic, with the links between them apparently arbitrary: we are both the victim by the road and (in imitating Jesus) the good Samaritan, because. Rather like a physicist confronted with a multiplicity of “fundamental” particles, this makes me want to look for a unifying principle beneath these different interpretations.

And so to our old friend René Girard, and the two dynamics he sees as driving human behaviour: mimetic desire (our desires are learned from those around us) and the scapegoat mechanism (human societies establish their unity by expelling an arbitrarily-chosen victim). How can these principles help us read the parable?

First, as most interpreters seem to agree, the priest and the Levite do not walk past the victim out of malice or heartlessness, but because touching a dead body (as it might very well be) would have made them ritually unclean. Concepts of cleanness vs uncleanness are an expression both of mimesis and the scapegoat mechanism: societies reinforce their unity by defining themselves over against an unclean “other”, and the desires of individuals within those societies are formed by those models of cleanness and uncleanness. For the priest and Levite to help the victim would not only have made them personally unclean, but would have undermined a unifying principle of their society.

The exclusionary mechanism is made even more explicit with the arrival of the Samaritan. Here is the very embodiment of the unclean other. Yet he is the one who breaks down the division of clean and unclean by helping the victim.

He does this by simultaneously showing his indifference to the exclusionary mechanism and (by so doing) taking upon himself his appointed role within it as the unclean other. After all, for an unclean Samaritan to touch a dead body was no more than he deserved, and only confirmed his status in the eyes of the “in-group”. But the Samaritan shows himself indifferent to this, and by acting as if the division did not exist he abolishes it.

So the Samaritan is doing more than just helping one victim: he is establishing a new way of being human, one in which we live as if the scapegoat mechanism, the exclusionary divisions between clean and unclean by which we shore up our societies, did not exist. By doing so we both confirm the abolition of that mechanism and place ourselves at its mercy by exposing ourselves to the scapegoating vengeance of those whose sense of belonging still depends on such divisions: the unclean making ourselves unclean, as the Samaritan would by touching a dead body.

This in turn draws together the different interpretations of the parable. Jesus is the Samaritan who destroys the exclusionary division of clean/unclean by both ignoring it and becoming its victim. It is then in a very precise (and neither arbitrary nor moralistic) imitation of him that we also become the Samaritan by treating any remaining vestiges of the scapegoating mechanism in the same way.

The new way of being human that is established by the Samaritan – one entirely without any scapegoating or exclusion or defining of ourselves “over against” some “other” – is to be found first of all at the inn, at which Jews, Samaritans and all others are accepted and included without distinction. In other words: the church.

Poll: Who is the innkeeper?

John H Sunday 11th July, AD 2010

The sermon at our church this morning was (as it will have been at very many churches) on the parable of the good Samaritan. I blogged some years ago on the “Lutheran” interpretation of this parable, when I heard it for the first time in 2004: namely, that the Samaritan is Jesus, and we are the man lying wounded and helpless at the side of the road. (Though Lutherans are not the only ones to read the parable this way: I’ve read a comment by James Alison which clearly showed not only that he, as a Roman Catholic, reads the parable this way, but that he took it for granted that his audience would do so, too.)

But as Pr Joel Humann pointed out on Twitter (and in his sermon at Cambridge this morning, I gather), there is a further figure in this parable who is often ignored: the innkeeper. As Jesus puts it:

Then [the Samaritan] put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.”

I heard a sermon in the early/mid 1990s by evangelical preacher Roy Clements in which he had some fun at the expense of medieval Catholic interpreters of the parable, who (he told us) interpreted the inn as the church, the two denarii as the sacraments of baptism and holy communion, and the innkeeper as the pope. Actually, when you read the parable in the “Lutheran” way, with Jesus as the Samaritan, those ideas don’t sound quite as daft.

So, I’d be interested to know what people think of the innkeeper. Who is he? Does he represent:

  1. The pope.
  2. The office of the holy ministry.
  3. An example to all Christians of how we are to care for those whom Jesus brings to us.
  4. No-one: he’s just a vivid narrative detail to make the story work, dude. Parables aren’t allegories!

Over to you!

Revving up

John H Wednesday 7th July, AD 2010

Rev is the latest in a long line of clerical sitcoms – but it’s a long way from the cosiness of the Vicar of Dibley or the surreal genius of Father Ted. It stars Tom Hollander as Revd Adam Smallbone, the vicar of an inner London parish, beset by tiny congregations, lack of funds and pressure from his superiors to turn things around quickly. The Observer had an excellent review of it at the weekend.

In this week’s episode (the second), Adam’s small congregation finds itself overwhelmed by the members of a large evangelical Anglican church whose building is undergoing refurbishment. They are led by the tanned, handsome and malevolent Darren, who quickly elbows Adam aside to replace the genteel liturgical worship with sofas, a smoothie bar and Christian rap, and then refuses to go elsewhere when Adam objects. As he tells Adam in their crucial exchange (from around 20m 30s on): “this church is ours now…”.

The episode is well worth watching while it’s on iPlayer. Rev has an excellent cast – Hollander, Olivia Colman as his wife, Simon “Fra Pavel” McBurney as the worldly, iPhone-wielding Archdeacon – and there are some genuinely funny moments (not least in the attempts by Adam and his wife to rekindle their sex life). But what I wanted to discuss in this post is the depiction of evangelical Anglicans.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this as a crude, ugly and inaccurate stereotype. I’ve known plenty of evangelical Anglicans (I’ve been one!), and I’ve never come across a minister like Darren: arrogant, bullying, nakedly aggressive in the use of money and power. “Your pathetic, liberal acceptance of [gay people and women priests] disgust me” – I can’t hear any evangelical minister saying that to Adam’s face in that way. Nor demanding that a church member be barred and prosecuted for inappropriate behaviour. Nor (most especially) mocking Jesus’ words about forgiveness.

However, this episode still touched on a real phenomenon, which I wish it had addressed a little more subtly and intelligently: the tension within the Church of England between small, traditional, liberal parishes and large, wealthy evangelical congregations.

From the evangelical side, I can say from personal experience that there is a widespread disdain for small, traditional, liberal, struggling churches, and an unshakeable confidence that the evangelical model of worship, teaching and discipleship is the only way to turn things round.  As Darren puts it in that exchange with Adam:

The church was empty, Adam. Now it’s full. Because we appeal to people – you don’t. Our God is a success – and that scares you.

Now that I can imagine many evangelical ministers saying, without malice: and many non-evangelical ministers being forced to admit they have very little answer to it beyond Adam’s distaste for a style of worship that is “more of a show than a sacrament”.

Darren could have been depicted as sincere, acting in good faith to achieve what he considered the best outcome for the gospel – and, as a consequence, unconscious of the collateral damage being caused, of the power the wealth and size of his congregation affords him, of the unconscious arrogance of believing that his success represents conclusive evidence of God’s support for his way of doing things over Adam’s.

That would have made it more successful dramatically, because Darren would have been a more complex and interesting person (just as one of the great strengths of the programme is that Adam is complex and interesting), as much a victim of the impersonal dynamics of money and power as Adam. It would also have made it less easy for evangelicals to dismiss out of hand its depiction of what their advances into new territory can look like from the other side of the fence, and of the genuine tension that exists between holding to “the deposit of faith” (including inherited forms of worship) and doing “what works”.

“Shield this child by morn and eve”

John H Tuesday 29th June, AD 2010

This hymn caught my eye earlier today. It’s a baptismal hymn, but I think it applies almost equally well as a prayer for any infant – particularly those who are vulnerable; particularly the unborn:

Lord Jesu Christ, our Lord most dear,
As thou wast once an infant here,
So give this child of thine, we pray,
Thy grace and blessing day by day.
O holy Jesu, Lord Divine,
we pray thee guard this child of thine.

As in thy heavenly kingdom, Lord,
All things obey thy sacred word,
Do thou thy mighty succour give,
And shield this child by morn and eve.
O holy Jesu, Lord Divine,
we pray thee guard this child of thine.

Their watch let angels round him keep
Where’er he be, awake, asleep;
Thy holy Cross now let him bear,
That he thy crown with saints may wear.
O holy Jesu, Lord Divine,
we pray thee guard this child of thine.

The words are by Heinrich von Laufenburg, 1459, translated (like so many great German hymns) by Catherine Winkworth.

The “great school of prayer”

John H Sunday 27th June, AD 2010

In my previous post on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together, we saw how Bonhoeffer places the praying of the psalms at the heart of our prayer together as Christians. In this post I’ll look in more detail at his observations on the psalms.

“The Psalter occupies a unique place in the Holy Scriptures”, Bonhoeffer writes, by being both God’s Word and the prayer of human beings. However, when we come to pray the psalms for ourselves, we will quickly find passages that we feel unable to make our own: “the psalms of innocence, the bitter, the imprecatory psalms, and also in part the psalms of the Passion”.

The answer is not to skip the “difficult” psalms, but to recognise that “this difficulty indicates the point at which we get our first glimpse of the secret of the Psalter”: namely, that “here Someone else is praying, not we”:

that the One who is here protesting his innocence, who is invoking God’s judgment, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. It is he who is praying here, and not only here but in the whole Psalter.

So when we sing or pray the psalms, we are united with the prayer of Christ himself. The Church, as the Body of Christ on earth, “continues to pray his prayer to the end of time”:

Even if a verse or a psalm is not one’s own prayer, it is nevertheless the prayer of another member of the fellowship; so it is quite certainly the prayer of the true Man Jesus Christ and his Body on the earth.

And as such, the Psalter teaches us how to pray:

In the Psalter we learn to pray on the basis of Christ’s prayer. The Psalter is the great school of prayer.

It teaches us “what prayer means”, namely “praying according to the Word of God, on the basis of promises”. It teaches us “what we should pray”, namely “the whole prayer of Christ, the prayer of him who was true Man and who alone possesses the full range of experiences expressed in this prayer”. And it teaches us to pray “as a fellowship”, acknowledging that our own individual prayer “is only a minute fragment of the whole prayer of the Church”.

(Incidentally, I wonder if that last point is a way to understand texts such as Mark 11:24: “whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours”. Should this perhaps be seen as a promise to the church as a whole rather than to us as individuals? Perhaps some roving exegete could comment on this: for example, is the “you” in that verse plural?)

The psalms encompass the full breadth of prayer, just as the Lord’s Prayer does:

Oetinger, in his exposition of the Psalms, brought out a profound truth when he arranged the whole Psalter according to the Lord’s Prayer. What he had discerned was that the whole sweep of the Book of Psalms was concerned with nothing more nor less than the brief petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

Only the prayer of Jesus Christ “has the promise of fulfilment and frees us from the vain repetitions of the heathen”:

The more deeply we grow into the psalms and the more often we pray them as our own, the more simple and rich will our prayer become.

Spoilers…

John H Saturday 26th June, AD 2010

Just as a quick aside, I’ve written a post about the series finale of Doctor Who. It is one massive succession of spoilers from beginning to end, so rather than post it here I’ve put it on a WordPress.com blog set up specially for the occasion.

Note that I am not, repeat not, setting up a Doctor Who blog. That way madness lies. ;-)

Praying together

John H Saturday 26th June, AD 2010

In the second chapter of Life Together (see previous post), Dietrich Bonhoeffer looks at “the day with others”. Most of the chapter is concerned with praying with our fellow Christians: as Bonhoeffer writes, “common life under the Word begins with common worship at the beginning of the day”.

The nature of this common worship will vary depending on the type of fellowship (e.g. families with children, fellowships of ministers), but the basic ingredients should always be the same: “the word of Scripture, the hymns of the Church, and the prayer of fellowship”:

1. Scripture (1): the psalms

Bonhoeffer urges the singing and praying of psalms as part of our life together. In the psalms the church joins its prayers to those of Christ himself, whose prayer the Psalter is. (More of this in my next post.)

2. Scripture (2): reading the Scriptures

Bonhoeffer advises that the reading of Scriptures in the fellowship should consist of extended, consecutive readings rather than isolated texts. It is as a whole that the Scriptures are “God’s revealing Word”:

Only in the infiniteness of its inner relationships, in the connection of Old and New Testaments, of promise and fulfilment, sacrifice and law, law and gospel, cross and resurrection, faith and obedience, having and hoping, will the full witness of Jesus Christ the Lord be perceived.

Hence Bonhoeffer recommends that a family fellowship “should surely be able to read and listen to a chapter of the Old Testament and at least half a chapter of the New Testament every morning and evening”.

3. Singing the new song

The psalms and the scripture readings should be followed by “the singing together of a hymn, this being the voice of the Church, praising, thanking and praying”. Why do Christians sing together?

The reason is quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because they can unite in the Word.

Music is “completely the servant of the Word”, which leads Bonhoeffer to argue that “the singing of the congregation … is essentially singing in unison”. “Destroyers of unison singing” must be “rigorously eliminated”: whether that’s those calling attention to their musical abilities by improvising harmonies, or those “who because of some mood will not join in the singing and thus disturb the fellowship”.

4. Saying our prayers together

Having “heard God’s Word” and “been permitted to join in the hymn of the Church”, now “we are to pray to God as a fellowship”. This “must really be our word, our prayer for this day, for our work, for our fellowship, for the particular needs and sins that oppress us in common, for the persons who are committed to our care”.

Bonhoeffer’s advice is that this prayer should be “said always by the same person”, but in their own words rather than using set forms:

The use of formal prayers can, under certain circumstances, be a help even for a small family group. But often a ritual becomes only an evasion of real prayer. The wealth of churchly forms and thought may easily lead us away from our own prayer; the prayers then become beautiful and profound, but not genuine.

The “situation in public worship is different from that of daily family worship”; within the family or small community, “the poorest mumbling utterance can be better than the best-formulated prayer.”

Conclusions

I found this chapter challenging. It made me acutely conscious of how weak/non-existent our own collective family devotional life is, and also of how weak my own personal prayers have become. Use of the daily office has been a great help in the first three stages described by Bonhoeffer – praying the psalms, reading the Scriptures, singing the hymn of the church – but has led me to underplay the fourth aspect, that of praying in my own words. Not completely, by any means, but enough for this chapter to make me rethink how I go about my personal prayers.

Similarly, I hope Bonhoeffer’s challenge will also inspire me to new attempts to foster more shared devotional time with E as a couple and with the boys as a family – though my work patterns (among other things) make this difficult to implement to the extent described by Bonhoeffer.

Life together: community through Christ alone

John H Friday 25th June, AD 2010

I’ve recently been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together, in which Bonhoeffer reflects on the nature of Christian community based in particular on his experiences running the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde between 1935 and 1937.

The starting point for Bonhoeffer’s reflections is Psalm 133:1: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” As he observes:

It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. … It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s Word and sacrament. Not all Christians receive this blessing. The imprisoned, the sick, the scattered lonely, the proclaimers of the Gospel in heathen lands stand alone. They know that visible fellowship is a blessing. (pp.7,8)

Christian community means “community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ”. This means that, first of all, it is a community that is formed by “the Word of God in Jesus Christ”. And what Bonhoeffer has in mind here is not the written Word of Scripture, but the Word that is spoken by one Christian to another:

God has willed that we should seek him and find his living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore a Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. … The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure. (pp.11f.)

Because Christian community has been established by Christ purely on the basis of faith in his Word, it is a mistake to look for “some extraordinary social experience” or “some wishful idea of religious fellowship”:

By sheer grace God will not permit us to live even for a brief moment in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. (p.15)

Hence true Christian community is realistic:

Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. (p.15)

By contrast, anyone “who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter”. Similarly, the survival of a Christian community depends on “whether it achieves sober wisdom” regarding this distinction “between a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and human community”:

In other words, life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy, catholic, Christian church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and and struggles and promise of the whole Church. [...]

There is a particular risk when we start exercising a right of selection over who enters our community, or separating ourselves from other Christians, other than where this is “necessitated quite objectively” (e.g. by “common work” or “local conditions”):

When the way of intellectual or spiritual selection is taken the human element always insinuates itself and robs the fellowship of its spiritual power and effectiveness for the Church, drives it into sectarianism. The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door. We must, therefore, be very careful at this point. (p.24)

That’s not to say that Christian community should be a dour, hairshirted experience without joy. As Bonhoeffer points out:

There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his life. But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. … We are bound together by faith, not by experience. (pp.25f.)

“How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity”: and Bonhoeffer concludes that:

…now we can rightly interpret the words “in unity” and say, “for brethren to dwell together through Christ“. For Jesus Christ alone is our unity. “He is our peace”. Through him alone do we have access to one another, joy in one another, and fellowship with one another. (p.26)

Mimetic desire and the Lord’s Prayer

John H Thursday 17th June, AD 2010

I’ve posted quite a lot in recent months on René Girard and James Alison and the concept of “mimetic desire”, but if the core of what Girard and Alison are saying on this subject can be condensed to a sentence, it is this:

We desire according to the desire of the other.

That is, humans are desiring beings. Where other animals have instinct, we have desire – and that desire arises in imitation of those around us, including the complex social and cultural patterns of behaviour and belief into which we are each born.

The question is then, which “other” are our desires going to imitate? The “social other” that surrounds us, the other of mimetic rivalry and violence? Or “Another Other”, one who is entirely outside those human patterns of mimesis, who has no rivalry or violence towards us – who, on the contrary, becomes the wholly-innocent victim of our rivalry and violence?

This then brings us to the subject of prayer. Prayer is about desire: about being honest with God about what our desires are, but in doing so coming to be shaped increasingly by his desires. To illustrate this, I want to develop some thoughts sketched out by James Alison in the closing section of his essay Prayer: a case study in mimetic anthropology, on the subject of the Lord’s Prayer.

As Fr Alison observes, the Lord’s Prayer “is all about desire”. It starts with God’s desire, then moves on to the expression and reorientation of our own desire. I’ve summarised this in the following diagram:

This shows the first half of the prayer as being concerned with God’s desire: for the hallowing of his name, the coming of his kingdom, the doing of his will. In the second, we move on to our own desires – starting with our most basic and immediate desire, the desire for “our daily bread”.

However, we then move on to two final petitions that I have shown in columns, to highlight the parallels between them. These petitions have much the same focus: embracing our “new self”, the self that is formed by the regard of “Another Other” in forgiveness and freedom from fear; and letting go of our “old self”, the self that is formed by our regard for the “social other”, of hanging on grimly to the “debts” owed by others and being bound by Satan’s patterns of mimetic rivalry. This is shown in more detail in the following diagram:

So the Lord’s Prayer itself is an expression of “mimetic anthropology” expounded by Girard but clearly understood by many before him, supremely by Jesus. To pray it is to have our desires, and thus ourselves, reshaped by “our Father in heaven”.

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