Lk18v1-2 Okay, fine. I'll ask again.
Lk18v3-4 π¨π»⚖Who is God? What picture of God incites you to pray? What picture of God would you use to motivate others to pray without ceasing?
π· Jesus conjures a world in which we are widows. We are widows. Tragic precarious characters in a callous universe controlled by selfish genes, random chance and cruel fate, an existence pitted against nameless adversaries. We are hard-done-by ones, carrying a victim complex entitlement curdled in a survivor’s guilt. We are bitter black widows armed with the fury of being spurned by the cosmos, abandoned in an act of God, infinitely vulnerable we have nothing left to lose in gaming compassion and unabashedly importuning fate, raging at the night sky, calling down curses at the absurdity of an indifferent infinity.
π°π€΅ But we are not widows. We know secure attachment as the infinitely beloved bride of Christ. He, our cosmic husband, he is alive. So, why then speak of us as widows and the universe as an unjust judge?
~ The parable works if we are not widows and as such should ponder how far from widow we are, thus as an a fortoriori argument - as being much more then how much more should we enjoy to pray constantly.
~ The parable works if we consider all the ways we are widows in the not-yet dimension of our now-and-not-yet of our being - and in such we should be persevering in prayer.
π❔ What, then, is prayer?
π❔ What is it?
π❔ What do you do in the doing of prayer that would and should be persistable resilient perseverent? I have struggled to categorise my unease with the Pray Until Something Happens bracelets. Is prayer itself not it’s own form of a Happening? What are the sufficient conditions for 'Something’? How do you pray relentlessly without superstition? I want to learn to pray. I consider two proverbial widows: Muslims and the Occupy movement.
π Muslims. Five-a-day as if it be the food of love. Do you talk to God with others that often? Islam looms as a glaring a fortoriori indictment of Christian lukewarm pragmatism and our contemporary allergy to collective praxes. It is quite humanly possible to muster a community to convene to speak to a cruel and unspeaking God, how much more so we who believe in more-than? Hb10v25
⛺ Occupy. Bolshy askers who unabashedly demand justice, orphan anarchists railing to the barricade, laying their lives down. Prayer is desire. Prayer is holistic prophetic embodiment. Prayer is resistance. Prayer should risk to wear you out, or otherwise, why would Jesus have made time to encourage us not to grow faint. Christianity is an affair of the heart, it is the heart’s desires which God engages. Ps37v4
~ Desire God. Desire a world other than it is. Do the desiring together and do not grow weary. In this way, pray.
Lk18v5-6 The unjust judge is ultimately unjust because he does not rightly hold the parts and the whole. This judge ultimately caves into justice for the sake of order, he wants the whole to be less chaotic. There is something in him of the detached politician who doesn't really care about individuals but cares about 'society as a whole', cares that there are people who are not too upset or angry or revolutionary, because that makes the whole unstable. The unjust judge does not care so much for the widow, but cares if she wails outside the door making a fuss, he cares that she's a bother. This desire for peace and order in society, untethered from care for the individual, represents God's heart in the former but absolutely distorts God's heart in the latter. God is interested in justice for the sake of both the parts and the whole, the means and the end, the individual and the collective. A just society is a better society (the spirit level, and all that) and so even a theology that over-emphasises the collective and under-emphasises the individual can be made to recognise the individual through persistance. This is the heart of activism, which rails against dehumanisation. This parable tells us something about how we can pursue justice in a broken world, then, and also something about God. There are different strategies for pursuing justice in a broken world - if eliciting empathy and recognition of personhood does not work, then civil disobedience might. Insofar as the parable tells us something about God it is that God is unlike the judge in that God does not only care about creating a well-oiled society (he does, but not this alone), but also cares absolutely and deeply for the individual. Levinas highlights that in life together we must always hold together a sense of the objective ordering of society with an absolute intersubjective concern for the individual face to face. And God is the zenith of both prongs of justice.
Lk18v7-8 ⏩ "speedily" A relative term, in the light of eternity. It would be possible to get hung up on a metric for this speed as if to ponder a theology of speed along the lines of: πΌπΌπΌπif angels can dance at the speed of light, how many of them could be said to fit on the head of a needle in a given perceivable moment. Speedily is in the eye of the beholder. It is a relative term. It is an honourific. How fast is fast enough to qualify as speedily? The world wants fast.
π’ What do we want? Justice!
π’ When do we want it? Now!
⏱ The bible recognises the value of speed, the prescience of efficient reconciliation, the non-linear relationship of delays to entrenching bitterness over time.
Mt5v25 "Settle matters quickly with your adversary.."
Eph4v26 "Don't let the sun go down on your anger.."
⏱ This is a quality of God which we can practice, like operating on the basis of abundance, but in the domain of time. Operate on the basis of urgent prescience. Forgive first and fast.
"will he find faith on earth?" Have you found faith? Elusive commodity that it is. As fast as justice is, it is held in loving tension with patience:
2Pt3v9 "not slow in keeping his promise as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient.."
Rm5v6 "At just the right time.."
Too quick justice would doom us all.
This is a quality of God which we can practice. Being long suffering, bearing up in God's strength in the not-yet for the not-yet. Waiting patiently with God, as the vast human oil tanker of the cosmos is nudged round in its orientation, by a million acts of loving forbearance and miraculous reconciliation.
Lk18v9-10 The GNB translates this: "Sure of their own goodness, but despised everyone else." The NIV: "confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else." The ESV: "trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt." Strong and evocative words. We all have a complex set of feelings about ourselves and about others, and these are interconnected. So many feelings, so much energy, so many arguments and so many stumbling blocks are the result of the tangle of deflated and overinflated self-understanding and other-understanding. We are liable to think both too much of ourselves and not enough of ourselves, and we are liable to think too little of others and too much of them at the same time. In Transactional Analysis one is encouraged to move away from [1] 'I'm ok, you're not ok' thinking and [2] 'I'm not ok, you're ok' thinking towards [3] 'I'm ok, you're ok' thinking. Some version of this is right, we need a recovery of common creatureliness and belovedness which puts all parties in a place of safety, grace and original imago dei from which to engage one another. This also needs to be coupled with [4] 'I'm not ok, you're not ok' thinking, a sense of the thread of brokenness that runs through both self and other. Holding together the true tension of [3] and [4], rather than an unstable oscillation between [1] and [2] prompts both humility and bearing-with, rather than pride, contempt, self-denigration or idolisation.
Easier said than done. So help me God.
Lk18v13-14 'All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted'. Why is this? Not because God arbitrarily likes humility more than exaltation and rewards the former and condemns the latter, but rather because the internal logic of self-exaltation means that this method quickly runs out of itself and blocks the way of the infinite. Our egos so quickly artificially inflate and stifle the natural flow of God's power and glory and grace, whereas humility puts us in the more tender place of surrender and attunement to the already-at-work trinitarian abundance, where we join in the dance of Father exalting Son exalting Spirit. We get to join in! When not preoccupied with our own small souls.
Lk18v15-16 It's been the emotionally busiest week of the year. And then these verses. I took off for a walk with God, yesterday, Saturday, phone-off, striking out to Clapham's coffee, thence winding in the sun to Brixton. Aching, at length, What is a child..? A dusty Coldharbour Lane's hum dappled by autumn was hosting a dispute in the distance, a hundred yards closer to and he was bellowing at she screaming at him. Their bus stop twitched anxiously. "You're not going to keep the child. I've got a son already.." So loud. She stepped into the bus lane to hail the P4. He wrangled her from the door and pinned her painfully against a wall. "Get rid of it." So loud. The mustered poses of the bus stop intended to intervene. She tore on to the bus. He slunk away. All of reality is shattered. It is no heroic ruin, but a soiled mediocre edifice, crumpled in a tawdry amateur social-realist film. I sat down on one of those awkward one-person benches. The unbearable banality of all my own helpless but culpable evil. The triviality of pondering what is a child? ~ Everything in me full of pride and death lurks in the discipleship on display in these verses.
πΆ What is a child? It's not self-evident what exactly the disciples see and rebuke in the bringing of children. It is preached somewhat intuitively that we are to come God as children, children qua small and humble. But somehow, the children in these verses must have been offensive to the disciples, and offensive by virtue of some childic quality other than their innocuous compact frames. All around me children are obscured, prevented, excluded and generally anathema to the elaborate system of London without, and anathema to the plausible praxis of responsible mental frailty within. Why? How might it be otherwise? What is a child?
πΆ A child is a display of the Kingdom. Not incidentally. Where children are, there the Kingdom is. It would be too strong to say, where children are not, there the Kingdom is not, but. But there is something unabstractable about a child, that cannot learnt elsewhere. There is a quality of the Kingdom which is exclusively to be understood in the close observational study of children, and by study of one's self as you are transformed by the intimate responsibility for an infinitely dependent tiny human.
πΆ A child is irreducible. A child is a distinct thing. No mere sum of abbreviated parts, no mere adult in waiting, not merely a coincidence of the qualities of physical vulnerability and prepubescent underdevelopment. A child is not a scaled-down, dialed-down adult, they are not an echo suggesting their future utility, they are a distinct things in their own right. They have their own unique ability to contribute to the well-being of society. They are agents they are participants, and, properly engaged they are a cure for many ills.
πΆ A child is an end in itself, but never apprehensible as an end in itself. No one is capable of desiring (or undesiring) a child abstracted from its social and economic signification, the mire of idolatry, powerplay, insecurity, which a child makes itself a conduit for. We are only capable of desiring the presence or absence of children in corrupt and half-formed ways, we a moved by those ends to which a child is the means, the heaven or hell it promises, the extrinsic cost or reward. The human heart is selfish above all, and a child is fuel to that fire. No child needs to be born as their parent's salvation, no child can bear that toxic mantle. No child should be unborn as their parent's salvation. Oh what a wretched man I am.
πΆ A child is cherubic innocence. A child is a trophy of purity and everything you could have been. A child is a blank slate, a vessel for the projection of ideals. These untarnished future humans are the solution to every contemporary problem of mankind. A saccharine and sentimental salvation, they are flaunted as tacit bundles of a fecundity gospel misreading 2Tim2v15 as a biological reward from the prosperity God's cosmic slot machine Ps127v3 Mt19v29 Pr3v9-10.. A child is a status symbol, a luxury accessory, the fruit of obedience to the cultural mandate Gn9v7. Queen Bey knows it; Children of Men captures it. A child is an emotional cheat code, a totem of phenomenal influence, a lightsabre of coercive cute.
πΆ A child is an investment. A speculative investment with ROI in about 30 years. A child is a slowly appreciating asset, a nest egg, a capital growth plan. A child is a massive gamble, plurally they are a hedged bet on your pension future, so have a quiverfull Ps127v5.
πΆ A child is a side effect of intimacy. A byproduct of love within a controversially gendered, controversially heterosexual universe. A multitude of children would be the default course of action. So much so that the burden of proof should fall on our onanistic [Gn38v9] and ruthlessly contracepted civilisation in which children are not seen and not heard and not born. The abortion debate is not a niche ethical concern, it is a conerstone of modernity, Alastair Roberts draws this out into deeply uncomfortable waters. What would the opposite of our civilisation look like, wrt fertility? What would the opposite of the invisibility of children be? What furnishes a universe with that plausibility? What sort of no-holds-barred intimacy, what sort of macro finance, what sort of relentless and reconciled grandparenting, what sort of unsiloed despecialised industries of care, what sort of asymmetrically gendered self-understanding.. what would undergird a procreation of the many and not the few?
πΆ A child is a person. Awkwardly there. Undeniably infinite in value. Helplessly incapable of self-care. You were once one - embarrassing to say. There are no shades or gradients in their personhood, while their strength, size and savvy may grow, their personhood is obnoxiously binary. The newborn is unlimited intrinsic value, and zero or negative utility value. This gnaws at the pride of the disciples, it unsettles materialists. A child is uncomfortably and devastatingly a person - they are perhaps the supreme testimony to this - if only we would have more of them, more conspicuously around.
πΆ A child is link in an intergenerational continuum. Christianity is an intergenerational continuum. We are formed in such a full stack, full spectrum, holistic communion of generative generations. A child is the cause and the effect, the means and the end of enduring and adoring familiality. Have children. Bring the infants to Jesus. Contra protestantism's sterile individualism, that de-venerates Mary and disavows paedobaptism, and that so elevates a workplace work ethic as to subtly devalue non-fungible labours of care. Blessed are the breasts that nursed Jesus? Lk11v27 No. “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” Thusly, believing that Jesus was raised on formula. We razed the villages needed to raise a child. We have atomised faith, and abstracted family and obscured the idea of children. Christianity is something that we do and we can do it in degrees of excellence, together.
πΆ A child is a personal liability. “Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days..” Luke 21:23; “they will say ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.'" Luke 23:29 A child is a symptom of peace. A child is a canary in a coalmine: the first to go when things turn sour. Things have turned sour. These are the last days. Motherhood is a modern death, suburban slavery foretold in Revolutionary Road, marketed to as victims accordingly.
πΆ A child is a political liability. Children are a plague, the most eradicable form of the human virus. So Herod Mt2v16, so Pharoah Ex1v16, so capitalism commitment to entrenching silos of the exploitable sexless ageless childless invulnerable worker - by a similar expedient genocide. A child is an afterthought, an externality, a fly in the ointment of a robotic future. Children are voiceless and voteless in all democratic systems of government, and children a burden to the economy for longer than the political term of any democratic system.
π€ "Come to me" Let them. Come to Jesus - he is necessary, he is sufficient. For your inner child. For your future child. For your estranged children. Stop preventing them from coming to Jesus.
π€ "Touch them" Christianity is negotiated contact time. Christianity is haptic and tactile. Christianity is proximity to brush up against.
~ Allow it. God, please.
Lk18v19-20 Good. Good enough. Goods and services. Goodness gracious. Goodie two shoes. The good stuff. What good is it? There is a gooey sort of good. A vague nicety. A tolerable vanilla. Is your God good? Ref Tomlin's tautological father here transposed
God is good? All the time.
All the time? God is good.
Is your God's goodness merely a negation of the negative? That's not bad. The only sufficient goodness is superabundant prevenient self-sacrificial goodness. When the world sees a church that doesn't murder, steal or lie ~ the world yet knows, that is not good enough.
Lk18v21-22 Follow. It's hard to hear and analyse the word 'follow', so ubiquitous is it to hear the phrase 'follower of Jesus' that I find it hard to wade through the meaning of the word and pinpoint what it is that Jesus asks us to do when he asks us to follow him. The word is 'akolouthei', and Strong's tell me that the word origin is 'union' and 'a road' - to follow is to be united on the road. It involves being in the same place as someone, being present to them, and becoming like them, in some sense, in the context of a trajectory. Following follows the person to be close to them but it also follows them where they are going. There is surrender in following, both to what is unknown and unpalatable in the other's will, and to the unknown and unchosenness of the future, specifically the unknown of the place that he other may lead you to in the future. Following involves this double surrender. Tonight we discuss something of leading and following. It is not for us to tell others how to follow, so I commit this to the Holy Spirit. But we pray that as we try to image and incarnate the Kingdom of God in concentric circles, that we would model what it is to follow the Christ, to double surrender to the otherness of His will and otherness of His future, to actively choose this following. This passage is a warning about the things that stop us from following - comfort, entitlement and material goods being a common blockage, but there are other things we cling to which prevent our surrender. Spirit, we pray for the understanding, the grace and the courage to 'sell everything' that keeps us from following.
Lk18v23-24 "Difficult.." Ξ΄Ο ΟΞΊΟΞ»ΟΟ dyskolΕs I really want this phrase to mean something precise, I want some reference to nuance and triangulate what exactly this "difficult" is. The phrase only occurs here and in the parallels.
Mt19v23 - Rich is always the guy on £3k more than you..
Mk10v23 - Christian climbs hill difficulty..
Part of the difficulty, is the epistemological difficulty of knowing what wealth means. We did the pejorativisation of wealth in Lk16v23-24, and a discussion with Peter ensued which I haven't otherwise revisited. Christians should create value and steward resource and have much to give much. But. I think "wealth" is not merely unfortunately ambiguous, it is actively problematic. "Wealth" can and should be excised from a vocabulary of legitimate Christian pursuits, in favour of a notion of value-stewarding which carries more intrinsic generosity. Because "Wealth" has already been clearly defined in the popular imagination Hence presuming to be merely neutrally "wealthy" and remaining a Christian, this is extremely difficult. And, I would argue, impossible.
I want to acknowledge the range of meanings for "Wealth" and suggest that within that range there have been both good and bad meanings. This ambiguity is exploited, linguistically and so in life, by individuals trying to sell wealth products, and by the enemy trying to whitewash a deep pathology. Thus, I want to provoke, by a pejorative reading of "Wealth", a re-vocabularisation of the how we speak about money's danger and responsibility.
The range:
Good "Wealth" is Value. "Wealth"-creation is Value-creation, we are value creators, dazzling displays of the fruitful stewards bring about rich and flourishing commons, over and against all that devalues, distorts and destroys. "Wealth" is a reflection of justice in production and distribution, wealth is shalom is heaven is abundance. "Wealth" is poetic, it's a sunrise, its a rainbow, it is the commonwealth of the common good.
Bad "Wealth" is stored private equity. "Wealth" is an unfettered license to building bigger barns for the hoarded accumulation of private capital. "Wealth" is wealthier-than, it is always relative to the lower-middle-classes, "Wealth" won over and against the Jones. "Wealth" is GDP. "Wealth" is the entrenchment of the marketisation everything and rendering everything as fungible and defining all humans as producers and consumers only.
The ambiguity:
"Wealth" is a seductive word, it conjures comfort easily won, it suggests the business of high level abstraction. Would a dairy farmer identify as a "wealth" creator? would a mid-wife? would a dancer? ~ "Wealth" is a flabby vague idiom, comfortably blurry at the edges.
A friend in Nottingham wanted to cook some chicken. Do you want legs, brest, thigh, wings? No, do you have any general body meat? I his mind there was such a category, a none of the above, just meat without previous utility. So "wealth" hints at world where things have only market value* - if this wasn't the case you would talk of industry-creators etc - specific artifacts and specific processes engaged in the production of unabstractable things.
So, "Wealth"-Creators-for-Christ, who wouldn't want in on that sanctified fast-track to the middle classes. The ambiguity is exploited by well-intentioned ones such as Lausanne - who dangle the carrot of nice wealth, but I would say that they are naive to assume that "wealth creation" is a self-evident activity totally distinct from any Rich Young Man dilemma; naive also to assume that a note against "wealth hoarding" is a self-evident activity that can easily be extracted from the intrinsic mechanisms of fashioning "Wealth"-as-"Wealth"- and even if you could cleanly delineate wealth hoarding, I think it is grossly to underestimate it to think a caveat in a manifesto is proportional to Jesus' view on wealth hoarding. I think their whole project would be better served by a word other than "Wealth". In promoting wealth creation, I'm sure Lausanne don't want to multiply a band of rich young men, an army of stock piling little emperors - but it won't not happen be merely asking.
SB are building a platform for tokenised payments on the blockchain that is different to bitcoin in a salient way - it advantages you in no way to hoard it. It is an entire economy that only realises any value when it is in use as a discount token against that use. You can make SWC work really hard, but you can't speculate on it. Amongst the things motivating this startup is the hope to enable an enfranchised middle, and in certain people's language that would be to facilitate wealth creation, but I think my own current thinking is that it is Utility and value creation. I think wealth has many positive connotations, but in sum, I find it a tainted word with too much baggage to make a manifesto for.
I'm not making a point against the private property, and certainly not a political point that any good can come of centralising the administration of resources at inappropriate scales.
"Wealth" is dewealthed in/by the subsidiarity of household management weaponised as a tool for the task of Kingdom Home Economics. Everything should be tooled towards the activity, nothing should be lumpen capital. Urgently.
This is difficult.
Lk18v25-26 Jesus used surrealist humour before surrealist humour was a thing. A camel through the eye of a needle? We've become so familiarised with this phrase that we forget it's absurd comedy. Jesus uses absurdities and incongruities to draw our attention to the impossibility of the Kingdom within our own tidy logic and effort. He playfully brings us to a jarring halt, causing us to see reality itself differently. Allow yourself to hear the playful absurdity in Jesus' words, to feel their uncanniness. Let them unsettle you and amuse you both, insofar as both of these responses may lead you to give up your illusion of your control, of your safety and security in your own strength. The world is much much weirder than you think, the Trinitarian God wants to take everything away from you and give far more back. Don't be so fearful of this strangeness that you cling more tightly to your wealth or other comfort, lean in to the perplexing but captivating logic of the Godhead, that turns everything upside down and fits the whole cosmos into a stable. Help us, God.
Lk18v27-28 "We have left our homes." Or in KJV and others, "We have left all.." Left all. In the wake of Banksy's shredding incident, other auto-destructive artworks have been reflected on. Michael Landy's Break Down involved all his possessions being destroyed. Where does my sense of the plausible come from? My stuff is the facility of my horizon that boundaries my possible. What if we reconfigured all stuff as dead weight? What if the human race was a race to the bottom of emptied pockets generously disgorged?
Impossible is nothing.
~ Anxious Phil believes: Impossible is no-things, the voids, the tightrope walk with no rope - it can't be done.
~ Faithful Phil believes: The so-called "impossible" is nothing, it is bluster, exaggeration and distortion, by the Prince of the air, who's only power is to rebrand possible anxiously.
"We have left all.." Peter's evidence of the impossible? Peter protesting his own salvation? Jesus, am I poor enough? The world does not need put-upon bleeding heart martyrs pity parading their beneficence. Sacrifice is searingly relative - giving up chocolate for Lent is both significant and trivial at the same time.
Operating on the basis of abundance never sacrifices anything. See David Livingstone:
Lk18v29-30 Money is one thing, but for some of us the more fundamental, wide-reaching and habit-forming idol is our relationships. When she heard these things she went away sad, because she had lots of relationships. She went away sad because there were lots of opinions that mattered to her. She went away sad because her relationship status told her who she was. Husband. Parents. Brother. The children I desire but don't yet have. Colleagues. Students. Housemates. Friends. I have to 'give up' each one as the measure of my inheritance of eternal life. God, lead me from this sadness to surrender.
Lk18v31-32 π "See.." Don't you see? The attentive life. What would Jesus have you behold? Look where you're going, why don't you? We are always going up to Jerusalem. All of life is the final countdown. All of life is a long march to the dΓ©nouement. Behold.
✝ "Everything.." The full set. All of Ps22. All of Is53. A brutal totality. A comprehensive abasement, the systematic destruction of a person, utterly in all the ways you can unmake a man. Why is that important? Why was it not enough that Jesus be merely executed? If Jesus-died-for-my-sins is a substitutionary transaction, surely the unembellished extinguishing of a life for a life would accomplish this? Was Jesus death a superlative death? Is that important? How should I then live, and die?
π "Accomplished.." What have you accomplished? In the downwardly mobile Christian life, there are in fact a number of axes on which to seek to accomplish sacrifice, suffering and servanthood: physically, financially, sociopolitically..
Lk14v27-28 The cross is no mere execution, it is peerless torture porn, perfected cruelty, stress-testing the human body to the point of failure. The cross is a definitionally excruciating death, caused typically by asphyxiation, where the exertion of lifting one's broken body to breath exceeds the tormented body's capacity to resist the pain of so doing. The cross is organised persecution by a calculating enemy, gratuitous enhanced interrogation with no questions and no answers, it is a political death fashioned to be emblematic of failure through perfect public abasement and superlative shame.
Mk10v33-34 'And' Jesus is about to get chewed up And spit out And booed off stage. Jesus died for our sins. In stages. If Jesus had just wanted to die for our sins, orchestrating a single sniper's bullet would have been sufficient. What is irreducible about the distinct experiences of Jesus' total assassination: of being mocked And of being spit at And of being flogged And of being killed? In the mechanics of of salvation, somehow, suffering in every way allows Jesus to sympathise in every way and to atone in every way.
Lk18v33-34 They did not understand any of these things. What is the place of confusion and non-understanding in the Christian life? On the one hand 'God is not a God of disorder but of peace' 1Cor18v33. A well-ordered life involves some epistemic order, involves understanding, the trajectory is always towards greater understanding. But it is important for us to recognise (esp those of us who spend their days hungry for understanding) that (i) the road to understanding often involves confusion, and (ii) that epistemic order is not the only kind of order.
Of (i), understanding often involves unlearning of old presuppositions. Deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction is quickly a boring game, but often deconstruction of something old is needed to clear the road of the current aporia. Sometimes we have to sit down on the road, or walk backwards or across in order to find our way. This quickly feels like it becomes a vague fetishisation of 'I'm just in process, man', and there's lots of that around in the ether and in my lazy heart. But this doesn't mean that it's not true that robust dialectic towards ever expanding knowledge and understanding does in fact often involve a process of re-evaluating, unpicking presuppositions, laying things out and taking time to think about what was previously hard or even impossible to think about. The process of understanding is a genuine labour, involving huge amounts of not-understanding and confusion along the way. It seems very time inefficient - surely it would be better if we could receive divine data downloads with correct presuppositions in-built? The narrative of Jesus with the disciples illustrates that the process of coming close to the divine is typically very unlike this. It involves time, dialogue, repeating oneself, embodying the assumptions, getting it wrong, more dialogue. Bear with me, as I seek understanding in and through this messy process. In this drawn-out process, the disciples spend time with Jesus, which is part of (ii): epistemic and existential confusion invite us to draw close to the Christ in the space of unknowing itself, and there is an ordering of one's heart, one's attitudes, one's desires, one's loves which, while not divorced from understanding, exceed understanding. Richard Rohr's meditations this week have all been on this famous Cloud of Unknowing, and the opportunity it gives us to 'beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp arrow of longing and never stop loving', or with Merton to assert in truth that 'I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit': that I am in fact transfigured by all that God does outside the horizon of my understanding.
I pray for both prongs of the path from confusion, for myself and for you: (i) God, draw us from chaos to order, towards deeper, sharper, taken-apart-and-put-back-together mindful understanding of your Being, and (ii) God, draw us in our confusion not only towards knowledge but also towards surrender, towards trust, towards love, towards all holy longing uncodified by the spectrum of knowledge-ignorance. I recognise huge reservoirs of confusion in my life. Come with light and come with love. Amen
Lk18v35-36 "a blind man.. begging.." The Blind Beggar pub on Whitechapel Road is aptly named. Whitechapel having qualities of the Jericho road, a likely context for the ambush of Lk10v30's pilgrim making the same journey, the pub witnessed the Kray twins murder George Cornell at its saloon bar. The Blind Beggar was also the location of wandering evangelist William Booth's initial outdoor preaching that led to the formation of the Salvation Army in the East End.
There is special spiritual interest in these strategic geographies of flux, the grey no-man's-land at the urban periphery, where a frisson of fringe interests brush against the city proper. All arteries of power and traffic must cross a contended terrain, an interstitial sub-urban halo, littered with the long tail of human marginalia, the polluted detritus of perennial battles for the city's edge condition: the expelled and quarantined, also-rans and have-nots.
The blind beggar is the archetypal denizen of this realm. A transgressive domain neither the nether reaches nor too close to home, a convenient motel heterotopia. Jesus is at work there, the pathway to Calvary always travels through it. We are blind beggars. All around us, blind beggars, "inquiring what this meant.."
Lk18v37-38 'They told him 'Jesus of Nazareth is passing by'. He called out 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!'.' On me. On *me*. Much of what I am circling back around at the moment, as I try to locate and understand the voices that speak truth and lies to me, is that I believe that Jesus is 'passing by' me, and I do not have the courage to shout at him, I do not believe that he would engage me personally, would look me in the face, would have any specific love or mercy directed at me personally. I must take responsibility for having to courage to shout out at Jesus for specific mercy, I must ask him to see me specifically. This feels like such a Christianity 101 thing to be struggling with - God is personal! God loves you! These are still the absolute hardest and most unbelievable things to me. Sometimes when I try to inhabit the space in which Jesus sees me specifically and talks to me as Sarah (rather than treating myself simply as a conduit for a spiritual something, vaguely 'tapping into the Spirit' or 'being attuned to' the work of a vague transpersonal divinity, as I am apt to) I freak out. I am overwhelmed by shame, fear, a sense that it is disgustingly entitled to presume that the God would speak to me specifically. I do not want to put myself before his gaze, I want to remain in the crowd and later report to others about his goodness in a general sort of way. God is personal! God loves me! This is so hard. Please pray for breakthrough in this area, that I might hear it in the second-person from the person of Jesus, without flinching or running away: 'receive your sight'.
Lk18v39-40 πΏπ’ Jesus Christ. Son of God. Have Mercy on me, a sinner. The Jesus Prayer, wikipedia tells me, has its origins in Lk18, combining the publican/taxcollector's v13 "God be merciful to me, a sinner!" with the blind beggar's v38 "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" and then, v39 "all the more.. "Son of David, have mercy on me!"" - building through a quick crescendo from a catechism into a mantra into a bellowed slogan. He is ripe strawberries ripe. And I am a sinner.
π "Those in front of him" [in their Toyotas.] I tend to think of "the crowd" as a uniform ubiquitous dull mob bustled about Jesus with a consistent tenor of vanilla adulation. A crowd is fickle and varied - swelling as a singular swarm capable of an agency more than the sum of its corrupt parts - so we become "those infront of him" by accident by default, unless you actively resist the phenomenon you will huddle tribally.
π€« "rebuked" the tsking NIMBYs, theatrical shushers in a Punch&Judy call-and-response. He's behind you.. "rebuked" as the disciples issued to the children in v15. The crowd wants to dictate the terms of the environment by some sort of 1Co14v33 regulative principle, collectively to curate some experience without children and without blind beggars. When, and in what ways, is it wrong to rebuke? When I am in context sufficiently heterogeneous to need policing? When am I in contexts sufficiently needy, that such policing should be over-ruled by mercy?
Lk18v41-42 'What do you want me to do for you?' I started a list of specific things, big healings and hopes that I want Jesus to do for me. It is good to be specific, but I realise also that all these things come under a desire to receive spiritual sight and the ability and capacity to act accordingly. I want to see. Amen.
Lk18v43 ππππ "..sight .. glorifying .. saw .. gave praise.." Commentaries observe that Luke is fascinated by the phenomena of responsive doxology: Lk5v25-26 Lk7v16 Lk13v17 Lk17v15 Lk23v47 Ac3v8 Ac14:10-11 And it is fascinating, worship is peculiar. Emotional beings that we are. Affective, declarative, storied, relational, harmonic, corroborative.. Worship _can_ happen alone, but it is exponentially a collective phenomena. There is, here, worship leading to worship, a recursive or viral mode that effects a cascade of praise. You are a link in a responsive chain. We are the ripple. Faith builds faith. Testimonies beget testimonies.
π The blind man's praise comes from seeing from Jesus.
ππ The crowd's praise comes from seeing seeing and its explication in the praise attributing it from Jesus.
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