Looking and Seeing

When we come to the place of a skull, what do we see: a king or a criminal?

Proper 29c 2013 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The beloved Son… is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

I am sure that everyone here is familiar with optical illusions. These are the sometimes puzzling images that fool our eyes — or perhaps I should say, fool our brains, since it is the eyes that look, but it is the brain that actually sees. In these images our whole visual apparatus is tricked either into seeing something that isn’t there, or seeing something as other than it actually is. Some of those illusions can make two lines of the same length look as if they are unequal to each other — but when you get out a ruler and measure them, they turn out to be the same. Your vision may fool you, but the ruler tells the truth.

Another kind of illusion presents us with a picture that at first we see as one thing, but then realize with a shock that it can be seen as something else. Likely you are familiar with that image of two faces in profile looking at each other — and then you realize that it also forms a chalice.

Or perhaps more striking, I’m sure you’ve noticed the image I’ve included on the back of our worship bulletin today. It is called “All Is Vanity”; it was drawn by an 18-year-old artist, Charles Allen Gilbert, back in 1892; Life magazine bought it, and reprinted as a poster, a greeting card, and in just about any other form you can imagine. If it was around today they would produce it as a mouse pad and a screen-saver. The image was so popular that almost a hundred years later, the perfumer Christian Dior used an updated photographic version to advertise their new perfume aptly named “Poison.”

So what did you see first — the woman sitting at her vanity table, or the skull? Some of it depends on how close your eye is to it, or how far away; the further away you hold it, the more you see the skull; the closer you get, the more you see the woman at her vanity. You might say that that is the “real” picture — the one of the woman at her vanity table — certainly in the Dior advertisement, it’s a photograph of a woman seated at a table, posed exactly as in the original drawing - and that’s what the photographer recorded. Yet that skull — and the message it conveys — that all is vanity — is very hard to miss. So hard that it strikes me as odd that a perfume company would think it a good idea to use it to advertise their perfume; though I also wonder why they thought “Poison” was a good name for something you dab behind your ears! It is a bit like using the graveyard scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to advertise cosmetics: as Hamlet addresses poor Yorick’s skull and says, “Get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come.” It is a sobering reminder to see a vanity table as “the place of a skull.”

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Today’s celebration of the last Sunday in the church year presents us with just such a double image — and death is involved in it, and as well as a “place of the skull.” For we are told on the one hand that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. That is to say, God is invisible, but in Jesus you see of God all that can be seen; in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. But we are then confronted with the image of that same Jesus mocked and crucified, about to die upon the cross, with its mocking label, “This is the King of the Jews.” The irony is brought home by the fact that this Sunday is popularly known as the feast of Christ the King — but here that title of kingship becomes the means for mockery.

The problem is that the mockers — the bystanders, the soldiers, and one of the two thieves — look at Jesus and they do not see a king, but a failed revolutionary, perhaps even a madman who imagined himself to be a king. The English Christian author C.S. Lewis, the 50th anniversary of whose death fell just this past Friday — yes, the same day as John Kennedy’s assassination, so there’s another double image for you — he once wrote that people make a huge mistake when they try to picture Jesus as just a good man or a wise teacher. Jesus presents himself and describes himself as more than a mere wise teacher; at least the Gospels portray him as doing so. He presents himself as the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God. If that is not true, and he made those claims, then he is either lying or mad. As Lewis put it,

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil out of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

So Lewis said, and he was right. The problem is that most of the people standing at the foot of the cross cannot see Jesus as a King, cannot see him as the son of God or the Messiah, in spite of the fact what that sign over his head says — even if Pilate was merely making a cruel joke. Perhaps Pilate had begun to see something in this man more than most of the people could — it is always hard to tell exactly what politicians think. But for the most of the crowd, this was no son of God, this was no King — they simply couldn’t see it.

Its like someone who could look and look and just not see the skull in “All Is Vanity” — someone who insists “This is just a picture of a woman at her dressing-table, with her reflection in the mirror. What do you mean, a skull? Look, there’s the woman, her reflection, there’s the table, there’s the little drapery in front of the table; there are all her bottles of perfume, and her cremes and jellies. There’s no skull there!” And to a degree such a person would be right, for that is what the picture is.

Yet for those of us who see it, as the artist intended, it is the skull that stands out, rather than the woman at her vanity, even as we appreciate because of that artistry the artist’s message that life is fleeting and vanity is no refuge — with perhaps an echo of Hamlet in our ears that you can put on as much makeup as you want, but the bones underneath the skin will be around long after the rest of us has turned to dust. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity, saith the Preacher!”

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There is a huge difference between looking and seeing. Some who followed Jesus even from the beginning knew him to be more than simply a good and wise man. Yet some of those are also among the ones that fled when he was taken prisoner, were those same people. How deep was their trust? How deep was their faith, if they could run off like that? It is a lesson to us that Peter, the first one openly to proclaim Jesus as Messiah and son of God, was also quick to deny him three times that night he was arrested, when suddenly it seemed that everything was falling apart.

However, Luke gives us one short glimpse of a character entirely new to the story, not a follower of Jesus who had been with him from the beginning on the road, or who had heard his teaching, as far as we know, yet one who recognizes him and sees him — even though all he knows him as is a fellow prisoner, a fellow criminal for all he knows, condemned to death just like that other thief — and yet this crucified thief somehow is given the grace to see in the crucified man beside him, not only innocence, but salvation. At least one person there at the “place of the skull” looked at Jesus and saw him — not as a failed huckster or a madman or a demon, but as the Messiah, the Christ, the image of the invisible God, the Way to Paradise, the Truth of God, and Life everlasting.

May God give us the grace to see that Christ in the unlikely places, even the crucified places, in our lives — to rejoice with him in our joys, but to know him as well even in our sorrows and in our pains. May we look and see the one through whom God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross; even Jesus Christ our Lord.+

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Hurry Up and Wait

How the wounded heart can sing when God gives it word and wisdom...!

Proper 28c 2013 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; … but for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise.

Today’s Scripture passages give us stern warnings about violent days ahead, from Malachi for the people of Israel, and from Jesus for the faithful disciples. But while Malachi urgently prophecies that the day is coming soon, Jesus warns against jumping to conclusions. Jesus speaks of wars and insurrections, of disasters and plagues and famines, not as signs of the end-times, but as things that happen all the time.

And isn’t that the case! It has been estimated that in all of human history there has only been one short spell of about forty years when there hasn’t been a war going on somewhere on this good green earth of ours. Of course, war comes in all shapes and sizes — there are hot wars, with bombs falling and guns blazing; and there are cold wars, where weapons are not used except as rattled sabers to threaten mutually assured destruction, or the major powers act out their conflicts through surrogates — getting smaller countries to do the fighting with each other, backed by the major powers and the arms dealers.

And as anyone who has ever served in the military can tell you, there is also a great deal of inaction. Even the hottest war is often marked by long stretches of inactivity, punctuated by violent action. In World War II this gave rise to the expression, “Hurry up and wait.” In fact, there was one stretch early in that war, from late 1939 to early 1940, when the Western front was so quiet that people spoke of “the phony war,” or — making a pun the on the German Blitzkrieg (lightning war) — they called it a Sitzkrieg (sitting war). Of course, at that time in Eastern Europe, in Poland, the war was ravaging the countryside; it was Blitzkrieg pure and simple, and no one living in Poland had any doubt that war in its most terrible form, had arrived.

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So, in spite of the urgency of Malachi, Jesus seems to offer exactly the advice that mirrors the experience of many soldiers: hurry up and wait. When we turn to the Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, it looks like Paul is once again having to have it both ways. Someone, once again, has misunderstood what kind of waiting Paul intended. As I noted last week, Paul seems to have a particular communication problem with the folks in Thessalonica, and he finds it necessary to refine or walk back or redefine something he has said before. Here he says, “We hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work.” It appears that some decided that since Paul has told them that the day of the Lord will be coming any day — as he said in his First Letter — if that was the case then early retirement might be in order. Why work and save for tomorrow when tomorrow may be the end of all things?

And so Paul has to get on their case and remind them that the kind of waiting Jesus spoke of — and that he himself had counseled — is not just sitting around on your assets, but continuing to work and above all to remain watchful, to be alert, to stay awake.

And so it is that the waiting to which Jesus and Paul call them, and us, is not a waiting of inactivity but a waiting of watchfulness and preparation — watchful waiting. To put it back in military terms, we are not called to be like a soldier on leave or on R&R, or a sailor asleep in a hammock; but rather we are called to be like a sentry on watch, or a sailor high in the crow’s nest with an eye on the horizon keeping his eye peeled for any sign of the enemy, or like a radar operator bent over the screen, watching, keeping his eyes glued for sign of any impending attack. This kind of watchful waiting can be even more stressful than the heat of battle — it is no easy or relaxing thing to be prepared for battle but to have to wait watchfully — to wait for the blast of the trumpet to advance, or the whistle-blow to go over the top, either to death, or to glory.

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There is also, in Jesus’ charge to his disciples, a commandment to discern and to trust. He charges the disciples to test the waters: “Beware that you are not led astray,” he warns. Not everyone who appears in his name in fact bears his authority; there are wolves dressed as sheep — and shepherds; and many even among the faithful have been misled by false prophets, out to feather their own nest at the expense of the flock.

But having tested all who purport to speak in his name, Jesus also counsels the disciples to trust in the power of the spirit to give them the strength to persevere and to offer their defense— as he promises they will need to offer a defense, when the time of struggle comes, and they are brought before synagogues or put in prison. This passage must have been a great comfort to Christians in the time of persecution that did come upon them — initially from some in the Jewish community who saw them as a threat to their own faith, and brought them before the synagogue. Such a one was Paul himself, who in his early days, as we heard in the readings last month, was a terror to the church, a murderer and a persecutor. Before long the early Christians would run afoul of the Romans as well, as indeed Paul managed to do, when they refused to worship the emperor as god.

In later days the pagans of Scandinavia ravaged Christian lands; and in our own time — as recently as just a month or so ago, extremists have bombed Christian churches in Pakistan and the Middle East.

So these words of Jesus were — are, and will continue to be — a great comfort to those suffering persecution for their faith. For with these warnings comes a promise that Jesus gives the faithful: that words and wisdom will be given to them to stand up to those who persecute them. And the history of the church even up to now shows this to be true. God did give to some of those early martyrs a word and a wisdom that has endured to this day; whose words are still read, whose wisdom still inspires — and perhaps more importantly, whose witness is still honored, whose memory still encourages.

This week will see the feast days of two such early martyrs to the faith, one of them was an English king, the other was a Roman noblewoman. Both stood firm for their Christian faith, and in their trust in God. Edmund was a ninth century king of what later would become part of England. The armies of the pagan Danes had invaded across the North Sea, pillaging and ransacking the countryside with much loss of English life. Edmund’s bishops — even those shepherds — counseled him to give up and to accept the Danish bargain to let him remain as their puppet, figurehead king on the condition that he forsake and outlaw the Christian faith — all to keep the peace. (These were the bishops, mind you.) Edmund refused to forsake the faith, was defeated in battle, tortured and beheaded. That might have been the end of it all, but his example lived on — and the shrine of Bury St. Edmunds stands to this day as a testimony to his unwillingness to give up, to give in. He kept the faith.

The other martyr whose feast day falls this week is closer to home, though much further back in time, back to Rome of the third century — but there she is in a stained-glass window in our church. (And I put her picture on the back of the bulletin so you don’t have to crane your necks to turn around to see her!) Legend says that she was discovered as a Christian when burying her husband and brother-in-law, who had become Christians through her example. There she is: Saint Cecilia, honored throughout the world as the patron saint of music. The Romans wanted to make an example of her, an example of a different sort — getting her, as a leading citizen, a matron; they wanted to get her to forsake her faith publicly, thereby indicating to others that it was O.K. to worship the emperor. She refused to give in or give up, in spite of horrible tortures. And in case you are wondering why she is the patron saint of music, she fought back by singing — she sang, even while they tried to burn her alive, to steam her to death, to beat her to death. She kept singing the Psalms with all her heart, until finally a blow crushed out her life. And yet, as with Edmund, she is remembered to this day throughout the world as an example of endurance even in the midst of terrible suffering. And how the wounded heart can sing when God gives it word and wisdom to carry it through those terrible times!

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Terrible times, my friends, such as I pray we are not likely to see; we are not likely to suffer such persecution, such as they or our fellow-believers even today in Pakistan or Egypt — at most we are likely to suffer minor annoyances. Yet even so we can remain patient in the midst of those little annoyances — I mean, if we can’t even put up with the little annoyances, how in the world will we ever put up with the great ones. Maybe we can show our faith by our patience with those little things, because the great ones, if they come, will test even more sorely. If we can remain faithful, watching with our eyes and our hearts open to the coming of our Lord and God, we can receive those same words and wisdom that our Lord has promised he would give — who if he comes while we are alive, or comes after we have died, that for those who revere his Name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings.+

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What's Coming

Jesus on marriage, the life of the world to come, and a put-down for the Sadducees on their own terms...

Proper 27c 2013 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold.

Advent, the season of expectation both for Christmas and second coming of our Lord, will soon be upon us. Every year, it seems, the readings appointed for the weeks before Advent always seem to take on an Advent air a bit early, as if the framers of the cycle of readings just couldn’t wait to launch into the new church year — just as the merchants of the secular world can’t seem to wait until Thanksgiving any more to start the Christmas push; they want to start before Hallowe’en!

This tendency to want to jump the gun, to over-anticipate, is nothing new. Whether a holiday, or a holy day, or the coming of the Lord, there will always be someone pushing the calendar impatiently, trying to reach out into the future and drag it into the present.

One of the reasons that Saint Paul has to write a second letter to the Thessalonians is on account of just this eager anticipation. Someone, somehow, is spreading the word — either by spirit or by word or by a letter (even a letter claiming to come from Saint Paul himself) — to the effect that the day of the Lord has already come. Paul is writing to calm the Thessalonians down with a virtual, “hold your horses.” He warns the Thessalonians not to be deceived, and assures them that the day of the Lord will not come before the antichrist is revealed — though he doesn’t use the word antichrist, referring instead to the “lawless one” who pretends to be a god and even seats himself in God’s temple and proclaims himself to be God — of course, that’s exactly who antichrist is! We tend to hear the “anti” in antichrist as meaning “against” — but the antichrist is not some powerful atheist opponent to God or to Christ, but someone who pretends to be Christ, who pretends to be God: a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or in this case, a lawless deceiver who present himself clothed as the Lamb of God. As is often true, the most dangerous villain is the one who looks like a hero.

Paul is concerned for his flock in Thessalonica, and even adds an impatient, “Don’t you remember I told you all this?” Perhaps they do, but perhaps they also remember something Paul it seems has forgotten — that in his First Letter to them he had talked about the coming of the Lord as very likely happening within their own lifetime, urging them to be prepared to be caught up into the clouds with the Lord at his coming, and to stay awake and be watchful for the day of the Lord, that will come like a thief in the night. So it may be that Paul is reaping what he sowed, and trying to put the proverbial toothpaste back into the tube, walking back his words — as politicians have to do from time to time in our own day — because he got them overexcited and over-expectant in his first letter, his second letter has to call them back and calm them down: like the posters in war-time England that said, “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

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There is, it seems, an enthusiasm, an almost inescapable or uncontrollable desire to lay hold of the future and realize it in the present — like children who just can’t wait for Christmas morning to arrive. Give people the slightest hint or encouragement, and they will grab at it and run with it. On the other side, and we see some of them today, there are some people who have no use at all for such a future, who deny it or ignore it, or try to argue it away.

In today’s Gospel, some Sadducees come to Jesus with what they think is a foolproof argument against the life of the world to come, which they don’t believe in. They are among the fundamentalists of their day— they reject the “modern” ideas about resurrection. These notions have only begun to circulate since the Greeks and Romans came to dominate their land. The Law of Moses, as they read it, makes no mention of resurrection. There is no future life, there is no resurrection, no there is no kingdom of God awaiting the virtuous, no heaven. The dead are dead, and that’s it; all that survives when you die is your memory in others — their memory of you; the good are remembered with thanks, and their name endures, the wicked are cursed or forgotten. So the Sadducees believe.

So they try to trap Jesus with what they regard as the absurdity of this idea of the resurrection of the dead, by setting for him a puzzle based on one of the aspects of the law of Moses, an aspect that is very near and dear to their hearts. This is the law that requires a man’s brother to marry his widow if he dies childless — if he dies without children, his brother is to marry her. And the reason for this was precisely so that a memory of the deadman could continue, for the child born to his brother would not be reckoned as the brother’s son but as the son of the dead man. The biological father would be regarded, still, as an uncle. And so the dead man’s name would continue down through the generations.

This fits the Sadducee belief system perfectly: there is no afterlife or resurrection — only the memory passed down through your family, and so it is vital to continue that family, for the family name to continue on, for someone unfortunate enough to die childless; even — and I’m sure this has occurred to you — even to the extent of violating another portion of the Law that forbids a man to marry his brother’s wife. Moreover, the law requiring this exceptional and incestuous marriage also fits their agenda to find fault with Jesus. The Sadducees multiply the problem for him by imagining seven brothers, all of whom die after attempting to fulfill their responsibility. I suppose it’s no surprise that the woman died! The Sadducees set a problem for Jesus that they think is absurd — since the woman, again under the law of Moses, can only have one husband. Under the Jewish law a man can have many wives but a woman only one husband. And so, they are saying to Jesus, in this crazy “resurrection” you talk about how could she possibly have seven? They think they’ve got a “gotcha.”

Jesus rounds on them and he accuses them of trying to put the life of the world in terms of the life of this world. They try to imagine in the life of the world to come something which belongs only to this world — and that is marriage. Now, don’t get me or Jesus wrong about this. Marriage is a wonderful thing, and the love that spouses share can be blessed and beautiful. But marriage, as good as it is, is only a shadow of the all-encompassing love of God that those who are blessed to come to the resurrection will share. The life of the world to come is not just a repetition or continuation of this life, but a transformation of this life into something so beautiful, so surpassing of any joy we can possibly experience here on earth, that all of our former joys — as wonderful as they are, as good as they are — will seem like a snapshot compared to the real thing.

All that being said — which is quite a bit! — Jesus doesn’t stop there, with the teaching that marriage is a state of this life, not the next. For in the next life people do not have to marry and have children because they do not die! In the life of the world to come, life is everlasting. He doesn’t let the Sadducees off the hook at this point, even though he could stop there. He doesn’t let them off on their terms. They want to claim that there is nothing in the law of Moses about resurrection? Jesus says to them, au contraire! You want Moses, I’ll give you Moses.

Jesus goes right back to the beginning, to the book of Exodus, to Moses’ call from God, the moment at which Moses encounters God in that bush that burned but was not consumed (itself an image of the eternal being of God and of God’s kingdom) and the voice of God calling to Moses out of the bush: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” In this passage the eternal God identifies himself by the name I AM — and so if he is the God of the three patriarchs who died centuries before Moses, then they must still be present to God — that is, they are still alive. For God does not say, “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” but “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Somehow those patriarchs are still alive, still worshiping God, in God’s presence. So Jesus confounds the Sadducees with their own authority: with the writings of Moses himself, which they’ve heard read year after year, and yet it hasn’t sunk in; and it testifies that God lives, and that the patriarchs are alive to God.

I’m sorry that our Gospel reading stops with that verse; because the text continues, “Then some of the scribes answered, ‘Teacher, you have spoken well.’ For they no longer dared to ask him any questions.” Snap!

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The hardest thing, it seems, is to live in the present as the present, respectful of the past, and hopeful for the future. So many seem stuck either trying to relive past glories or joys and thrusting them into the future, or pulling the future closer to us than it really it is. Sufficient to the day is both the good and the evil thereof. Our call as Christians is to rest in the confidence of God, who is everlasting, who is at all times and in all places, past, present and to come; to rest in the confidence of Job — to know that our Redeemer lives, and that our redemption awaits us — and moreover that it is something that we will behold with our newly awakened eyes in the resurrection. With that kind of hope, standing firm and holding fast to what we have learned through the traditions and creeds of the church, handed down to us from the days of Jesus, we continue to trust that at the last he will stand upon the earth, and our eyes shall see — and what is future now will be now then.+

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