Prodigal

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

“The Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.'”

So Jesus told them a few stories, about things that were lost and then found, about a boy who got a little lost then found himself, came to his sense, as it were, and was welcomed back to the fold by a fond father, and finally about another who was never lost but lost himself in grumbling.

We get the point. Don’t we?

Then why do we still call the story, “The Prodigal Son”? Prodigal means spendthrift, wastrel, wasteful, reckless. There are no positive synonyms for prodigal.

So instead of focusing on the outcome of the story, about the story Jesus tells the Pharisees about themselves, the elder sons lost in grumbling, we lose ourselves in, well, grumbling. We continue to define the younger boy by the actions of which he has already repented, instead of delighting in the way that he turned himself around.

And thus and so, by our use of language, by using the title to  perpetuate the cycle, we continue to identify with the grumblers, and show ourselves in need of hearing the story one more time.

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Year C Lent 3: manure and mercy

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The thing about a parable is that it can be read from many different angles, with different results. Like those silhouetted pictures that can be a vase or a pair of faces, depending on where you place your focus, or those animated holograms which seem to move and change as you turn them this way and that. I think that the reason that Jesus used parables was because he was conveying a truth too complicated, too large, too perfect to be captured in one still frame, one stark image, one unambiguous slogan. When we ask of a parable, does it mean this or does it mean that, the answer is probably “yes.”

So this parable of the fig tree: a strange little story of gardening and efficiency, mercy and manure.

In Genesis, God creates the world and all that is in it, and it grows and puts forth fruit, and it is good. God creates the human, and places the human in charge of tending the garden; Adam is the gardener, charged with nurturing and protecting and cultivating the land.

Is the gardener Adam, then, pleading for the life of the fig tree even though it is producing so poorly, failing in its purpose, taking valuable nutrients from the soil for nothing? Is it Abraham, bargaining for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah – if I can find you just fifty righteous men, will you spare the whole city? What about forty, or thirty, or ten? For just ten figs, will you spare the whole tree?

And God agreed, and sought out the righteous of the city, and found only the family of Lot, and plucked them out of there before the destruction of the city.

Maybe that’s how Paul read this parable, because in his letter to the Corinthians, he says,

“It’s a scary world out there and scary things can happen – serpents and all sorts – so you’d better straighten up and fly right. Don’t put Christ’s mercy to the test. You shall not test the Lord your God.”

But Jesus reads the signs somewhat differently. He refuses to blame the Galilean rebels for the violence that Pilate visited upon them, and he will not attribute the construction accident at the Temple to unrighteousness. Jesus says, “It’s a scary world out there and scary things can happen. They happen to all sorts of people, good, bad, indifferent – because that’s what people are, all of them: good, bad and indifferent all at the same time. Repent, straighten up, so that you can concentrate on the mercy and love of God instead of living in fear of the random acts of fate.”

And he tells this story.

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” (Luke 13:6-9)

Let it alone for one more year; let it alone.

I am reminded of the story at the end of the book of Jonah – not the part about the whale or the fish or whatever sort of marine animal swallowed him up, but the part after he was spat out on the beach, after he walked three days into Nineveh, that city whose name is synonymous with Sodom, whose reputation was as bad as Gomorrah. The part after he preached repentance to them, the fear of God, the forty days they had to make their penance, turn their lives around, to turn their lives over to God. The part after they listened, and proclaimed a fast, from food and drink, from evil ways, from violence and from rich robes; from the king to the smallest sheep, all were dressed in their disgrace with sackcloth and ashes.

And God looked upon the city that God had promised to destroy, and said, “Look how they have borne fruit.” And God let them be.

Jonah was furious. He had come a long way and gone through a whole lot – storms, man overboard, fish belly, faceplant on the beach, and a long, hot hike through the vile and violent city. And now, he feels, it is all for nothing – God is not even going to smite them! He is furious, and he tells God this is just why he didn’t want to come in the first place: “I knew it!” he shouted, “I knew that you were going to turn around and forgive them, because that’s just what you do, isn’t it? All love and mercy and grace and forgiveness! All this trouble for nothing! You might as well just smite me instead!”

And he went off in a huff and sat down outside the city. God arranged for a shade tree to spring up and shade him, and after Jonah had let off some steam and cooled down some, he began to feel a little better about the world. Then God sent a worm to attack the root of the tree, and it died overnight. The next day the sun was back in full force over Jonah’s head and a hot desert wind completely blew his cool. Again, he railed at God, and again, God gently pointed out that Jonah had nothing to be angry about.

“Did you plant the tree, or water it, or tend to it?” asked God. “If you, then, are so keen to reverse the punishment that befell this tree, how much more ready should I be to restore the city of Nineveh, a city full of my children, not to mention their innocent animals?” God told Jonah a parable about a tree, about the fruits of repentance, about love and mercy.

Jonah’s worldview was steeped in judgement and anger, revenge and punishment. God’s view of the world noticed how dangerous those things were in the hands of God’s people. Perhaps that is why Adam and Eve were warned away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

God urged instead mercy and justice, love and forgiveness, patience and tenderness.

When you wonder, when someone asks you, what did I do to deserve this? – remember the workers killed at the temple by the falling tower, whom Jesus specifically absolved of any particular blame for their accident, for their misfortune, for their demise. This did not happen, he said explicitly, because they were evil or sinful. God is not punishing you, any more than God punished Nineveh.

When you hear the televangelist telling the victims of a hurricane or worse that this is God’s punishment for something that they have done, that we have done, that God refused to help their children because they didn’t pray right; remember Jesus’ words: Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No. God loved even Nineveh.

When Jonah went out of the city to the east, he was still running from God, just as he had on the ship, but God followed him, and explained to him in the parable of the tree God’s never-failing love. When your shade is gone and the sun is hot on your head, remember, God still loves you. God is forever waiting for ways to show mercy to you, in the comfort of a friend, in a whisper from the Word, in the silence of the night.

In his work on Jesus’ language of story and prayer, Tell it Slant, Eugene Peterson, who authored the Bible translation known as The Message, notes that, “Our translations obscure the identity of [the] word that Jesus prayed from the cross with Jesus’ earlier word in the story of the Manure and the Fig Tree. The farmer’s order, ‘Chop it down!’ is echoed in the Holy Week ‘Crucify him!’ Jesus prayer to his Father, ‘Forgive them,” is a verbatim repetition of the gardener’s intervention, ‘Let it alone.’”[1]

The same word that Jesus prays from the cross is the word that the gardener uses to plead for the life of the fig tree.

It is the same word that Jesus taught us to use in our own prayers, Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.[2]

Our judgement, of ourselves, of our enemies, of our friends, is no match for God’s forgiveness, no match for Jesus’ words from the cross.

Therefore repent, says Jesus, not because you are afraid of what might befall you: who knows what corners your life will turn, what fruit it will grow? Therefore repent, says Jesus, do not continue to test the Lord your God, because your God is ever waiting for your return, patiently, every year saying, “one more year, let it be, let it alone, forgive it, because it hardly knows what it is doing.” Repent, because God’s mercy endures forever.

[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 74

[2] ibid

[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 74

[2] ibid

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David and other saints

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

St David’s in the seventies. A family walking the cliffs around the tiny city on the sea; well, they were walking, but she was skipping. She was, after all, six. She was lost in her own thoughts, as was often the case in those days, out with her family but alone on the edge of the world, skipping.

From far, far away, a few feet behind her, she distantly heard the frantic voices of her parents, shouting in unison, “STOP! Stand still!”

She stopped, mid-skip, and returned to reality, one foot hanging in the air, inches short of the cliff edge. The path had turned ninety degrees just behind her, but in her own little world, it was straight on till morning, and she had nearly skipped straight off the earth.

I seem to remember that David was not keen to become archbishop of Wales. He was dragged out of a peaceful life of prayer and set amongst bickering bishops and given the task of setting them straight, or turning them around, as seemed best to him. His life of prayer never left him; but he was persuaded by voices not his own that his own road would not bend to his will, but that he must be guided by those around him who saw in turn where his leadership could help the church not to fall off a cliff.

We do not discern our life’s work, our ministry, even our passion alone. We are influenced, warned, repelled, drawn out, distracted and sidetracked, and saved by those around us; those we hear, those whose stories we read, those who pray for us.

I wonder how often David, a monk all at sea in the archepiscopacy, took to those narrow ledges to wander in the quiet of the distant surf and seagulls, the plain salt air, lost in thought, lost in prayer, and who it was that watched over him.

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Aflame

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Aflame with a passion which has
yet to be quite requited,
reaching out tongues of everlasting fire
to melt the perennially hard-hearted
with the patience of Time itself,
burning with love, yet unconsumed.

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Year C Lent 2: Temptations2: Too busy to be tempted

Posted on February 24, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Last week, we left Jesus, or the devil left Jesus at the top of the temple, tempted to cast himself down into Jerusalem and wait upon the angels to save him from a cruel death. He was tempted to abandon his mission and end it before it had even begun, with a sign and a signal of his power to summon the forces of heaven, and a sign and a signal of his capitulation to the expectations of the world and the devil, his conformation to the ways of the worldly wise, which would, despite its groundbreaking, breathtaking spectacle, change nothing.

Jesus rejected that temptation, he brushed the devil aside in words you can count on your fingers, words you can count on: Do not test the Lord your God.

Interestingly, in the gospel of John, there is no story of the temptations. The classical three-pronged attack of the devil in the wilderness that we heard about last week is missing, leading some commentators to speculate that the original stories of the temptations came from the people with whom Jesus interacts, the people who demand signs and wonders, and the people who attempt to turn Jesus from his mission, and turn him away from his destination, his destiny one might say, in Jerusalem [The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 9: The Gospel of Luke, The Gospel of John (Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 97]. People like the Pharisees of this morning’s gospel, who do in fact sound like echoes of last week’s tempter, who warn Jesus away from Jerusalem, because Herod, they say, is looking for an excuse, a way to kill him.

Jesus pays no more heed to the blandishments of the king, sent via the rumor mill and its willing grist, the Pharisees, than he did to the devil.

“Tell that fox I’m busy,” he said. “I am busy casting out demons and performing cures. I am busy in the mission field and down among the people. I am too busy to die today. Tomorrow doesn’t look great for it, either.”

It’s kind of the opposite of the temple temptation, and it’s kind of the same thing. Jesus would not compromise on his mission or its methods, for the devil, for the king, for his friends, for anyone. He would not be turned from his journey.

Lent is a season of penitence; we understand that. We know how often we are tempted and, unlike Jesus, are imperfect in our responses to those temptings. We are sorry for our sins; we repent, and we ask god’s forgiveness. But we also ask God’s help to do better.
Penitence, or repentance, is not just about grovelling in our shame; it is not about staying in the dirt, the dust and ashes of our sin. Repentance is to turn, to face in a new direction. As Jesus turned his face toward Jerusalem, so we turn towards the city of God, the heavenly city on a hill, where we are called and where we belong.

We are pilgrims on a journey till we get there.

Abram journeyed out of Ur because God called him, and even when the road was hard and he couldn’t see the way forward, God reassured him, and Abram trusted God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

We are citizens, says St Paul, of heaven. We are on a pilgrimage into a world where God’s kingdom is come, God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. Our citizenship belongs there, and we are restless until we find our home.
We are travelling with Jesus towards Jerusalem, the holy city where God longs to gather us under motherly wings, where God broods over us.

And yet we live in a world of brokenness; the foxes are loose in the henhouse. Jerusalem turned away from God’s care, refused to be gathered, to be sheltered, to be saved. Still it is the city which represents our hopes for a peaceful future together as children of one God, as well as the frustrations of our present reality, fractured and fighting.

Repentance is not only about dust and ashes. It is about the cities that we build out of the ruins of our broken promises of peace. It is about doing God’s will here, on earth, not waiting until we get to heaven.

Jesus was too busy praying to listen to the devil, and he was too busy casting out demons and performing cures to listen to that old fox Herod and his threats.

What are we too busy doing to be tempted this Lent?

This week, our neighbours in Chardon try to make sense of an unwanted anniversary. As they do so, the young man who shot his classmates is still awaiting assessment to see if he should stand trial. Families and friends still grieve the dead, and the injured and the innocent bystanders bear the scars of that morning. It happened just down the road. In the past two weeks, other schools in the area have received at least two threats which required anxious attention.

The foxes are loose in the henhouse. Our chicks, our children are being formed by fear; too many feel that spreading fear is the only way for them to get attention, and because of our fear they have access to too many instruments of fear, too many weapons, for their own safety. We don’t need Herod, these days, to make mayhem amongst the innocents.

Will you pray for our youth, for the casting out of the demons that beset them? Will you work to cast out the weapons of destruction that tempt those who hear their whispers?

Will you help perform cures, standing up for those who need health care, who need the support of our legislators to give them access to the services that many of us already enjoy?

Will you help cast out hunger, or cure the loneliness of someone who needs you?

Will you gather in the shadow of the wings of a loving God, who broods over us all?

Jesus was too busy with his own work to bother with the blandishments of Herod or of the devil. Can we say the same?

For every time we pray, “thy kingdom come,” can we take a step towards it?

The victory that Jesus demonstrates today is the victory of determination over intimidation, of hope over fear, of mission over misery, of hens over foxes. It is a victory greatly to be desired, and gratefully to be received.

“What,” asks the Psalmist, “What if I had not believed that I should see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living!”

But we have seen it, in the faith of Abram and the faithfulness of God’s promise to him; and we have seen it in the face of Jesus Christ. This Lent, gathered together as chicks in the warm wings of their mother, we will fear no evil, if we are busy growing in love.

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Be perfect: a Lenten discipline

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

This morning’s post was written as a contribution to a collection of daily Lenten reflections by thirty members of clergy of the Diocese of Ohio. The Rev Gayle Catinella, Rector of St Thomas, Berea, solicited, organized and produced the reflections, for which I am grateful. Today’s daily Lenten readings (Lesser Feasts and Fasts) include the advice (instruction? command?)  from Jesus to “be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.”

Saturday, February 23, 2013

 

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” Matthew 5:48

 

Be perfect.

Some of us need no second bidding: we take ourselves in hand, begin to chisel away at our own self-image. Lent is a good time to slam the doors on every temptation, fast from every fault. Everything imperfect is gouged out and chipped away until all that remains is dust and ashes and a disembodied voice whispering,

“This can’t be right. Can it?”

Be perfect.

Some of us need a second bidding. Try this:

You are made in the image of perfection; show it.

You are loved with a perfect love; share it.

You are a child of the Most High God.

Be perfect.

 

The Rev. Rosalind Hughes

Priest-in-Charge, Church of the Epiphany, Euclid 

 

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Jerusalem, Jerusalem

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
The chicks scatter, competing instead of complementing one another, straining to grow despite one another, as their the mother hen clucks her sorrow and spreads her wings, shaking out her feathers and down, offering her warm body for their comfort and solace,
and still the foxes prowl and scavenge and destroy the peace that would be theirs.

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Year C Lent 1: Temptations and the time of day

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The trouble with the devil is that he seems sometimes to make a lot of sense.

“You’re hungry – conjure up some bread,” he suggests. Quite reasonable. And it is not, after all, as though Jesus is not able to make bread – he stretches the loaves and fishes beyond their breaking point more than once in the gospels.

“You are the Son of God. You should rule the world.” How many times have we asked ourselves how much better life in the world would be if only, if only everyone knew and lived out the commandments to love God and love your neighbour – simple words yet so hard to put into practice, especially in a world divided into powers and principalities. Why wouldn’t Jesus want to do a deal, make some trades, take some political advice from the campaign manager of kings and make his mark?

And then, the last. The devil can even quote scripture to make his point. God said that the angels would take care of everything, so that you would never so much as stub your toe. Why not just close your eyes, fall back, and let them fix everything for you?

Despite our temptation to update everything into modern terms – email as the ultimate distraction of the devil – I think that in fact he probably had the classics covered already.

First, he tackles our bodies. Now let’s be absolutely clear: there is nothing, nothing, nothing wrong with relieving hunger or thirst or suffering of any sort. There is no virtue in prolonging pain for its own ends, and Jesus spent his life and ministry offering that instant relief of healing and feeding and forgiveness that his followers craved. But the temptation that the devil offered was not about generosity or charity nor even self care. Jesus had gone into the wilderness in the power of the Spirit, on a deliberate fast, in an honest attempt to claim the spiritual strength that his baptism had lent him to embark on the journey ahead. He had withdrawn to fast and to pray, and the temptation was to turn aside from that destination, and take care of his physical appetite at the expense of his spiritual longing.

It isn’t about being hungry or being fed. It’s about twisting relationships, so that the first thing that we think of when we think of prayer is coffee hour and the cupcakes we might find there. It’s about ruining our intimate relationships by letting our own desires overrule our concern and tenderness for our beloved. It’s about using and abusing drugs of addiction in an always doomed attempt to avoid the reality that surrounds us, the need to persevere day by day in the work of living with God and with our neighbours, with the hunger and thirst for righteousness which is just out of reach, and remaining hopeful.

In his little treatise about temptation, The Screwtape Letters, C.S.Lewis has his senior tempter advise the younger demon that, “However you approach it, the great thing is to bring him [that is, the temptee] into the state in which the denial of any one indulgence – it matters not which… – “puts him out,” for then his charity, justice, and obedience are all at your mercy.”[1]

It is about what we put first: our relationships, or our appetites. Jesus put his relationships first.

So the devil went on to talk about power. We all like the idea of the quick fix. Those get-rich-quick schemes which we all know are scams are still so tempting because we love the idea of getting to the top easily, quickly, painlessly. We know, too, all the good that we could do, if we had just a little more power, influence, money, ammunition. We would use it for good, wouldn’t we?

Elsewhere in the gospels, when a young man asks Jesus, “Good teacher, what must I do?” Jesus rebukes him, saying, “Why do you call me good? God alone is good.”

None of us has sufficient wisdom, grace, goodness to be trusted with power dishonestly come by. Even our best intentions can be misguided, especially if we start out by making deals with the devil.

It is worth noticing that the devil has fallen victim to his own temptation before this episode even begins. He boasts that all of the authority and glory of the kingdoms of the world are his to offer, “for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.” This devil, like too many of us, looks around and declares the world, or kingdoms of it, God-forsaken, and assumes that he, then, can take charge. But let us be very clear. There is nowhere on this earth that God has forsaken. There is no one in God’s good creation who is beyond the reach of the realm of God. God hates nothing that God has made, and God has made all of us.

The devil has fallen victim to his own temptation to take the place of God. When we consider ourselves to be exceptional, we have taken the first step towards accepting the devil’s offer, to use whatever means fall at our disposal to do whatever we consider necessary and good to bring about the order that we would like to see imposed upon the world. At its worst, we see that power played out in acts of violence and acts of war. We see it played out in homes and families, in parishes and in all sorts of systems, as we vie for power and influence trusting in our own righteousness.

Jesus said, “God alone is good. You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”

When we fall into the trap of worshipping ourselves, or our own intellects, our own insightfulness, even our own denomination or country or city as being worthy and deserving of the greatest power, we diminish our ability to worship God in humility and truth, and to receive the wisdom of God.

But there is a counter to that, in the third and final temptation. The devil says, “Fine. If God alone is good, and God alone has power, there is nothing left for you to do but to cast yourself on God’s mercy and let the angels bear you up.”

The temptation that he offers here is the temptation to helplessness. Don’t be fooled just because he quotes scripture. This is not humility, to offer up your common sense and your good conscience and your free will for the sake of sacrifice. It is not humility to say, “There’s nothing I can do, so I might as well sit back and do nothing, and see what the angels do about it.” It is not humility to deny the sincere human agency that God has given us, to live together in relationship, to work things out, to share our insights and influence, to work for the common good, to deny the power of violence and oppression, to feed the hungry and quench the thirst of those longing for liberty.

If we turn our backs on those things, we are not trusting God, we are looking for a God to blame when things go wrong.

That is the temptation that the devil offered, “Hurl yourself from the temple, so that you may curse God as you die.”

There’s a lot of irony wrapped up in these three little timeless temptations. Feed the body without feeding our appetites. Don’t grasp power, and don’t give up the power that we have. Be strongest when fasting and famished; worship the Lord your God, and live up to God’s expectations of you.

There is irony and there is complexity and it is confusing and that’s just how the devil works, playing one thought off against another, using the words of scripture against themselves, flattering and wheedling and then belittling in the next breath. It is exhausting just to think about.

But Jesus didn’t take a whole lot of time and effort dealing with it all. He didn’t enter into a debate with the devil. He didn’t argue or dispute or take a whole lot of notice, by the sound of things. He simply shrugged the devil away.

“One doesn’t live by bread alone.” “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Short, sweet, and to the point.

We know that we are subject to the temptations of inappropriate or inconvenient bodily appetites, vanity and false humility; they are the classics. Jesus reassures us that we don’t need to spend a whole lot of time worrying about them; not that we should pretend that they don’t exist,  nor that we should give in to them (he didn’t), but that we should not let them be the focus of our attention, we should not let them have that power over us.

Jesus spent forty days in the Spirit fasting and praying and concentrating on what was important: his relationship with God, preparing for his ministry. The episode with the devil, as we just read it, may have taken all of five minutes.

The forty days of Lent are for fasting and praying, studying scripture, building our relationships with God, and with our neighbours; practising disciplines that will enable our ministry as disciples of Christ, not for occupying our minds with the strategies of the devil, with temptations or distractions. They are not worth our time of day. To quote Lewis’s demons again, “Even of his sins the Enemy [by which the devil means God] does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.”[2]

Better, like Jesus, to carry on regardless, loving God and loving our neighbours to the best of our ability, and praying for the grace to do it better.

Paul offers this reassurance: “No one who believes in him will be put to shame,” and “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

The devil left Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, having finished all of his tests. Jesus wound up on the top of the temple, refusing to put God to the test by throwing himself on the mercy of the angels to rescue him from a cruel death in the holy city, and the devil left him until a more opportune time.  But we know that when the devil returned, Jesus had no more time for him during Holy Week than in the wilderness; so that no one who believes in Jesus will be put to shame, and everyone who calls on his name shall be saved.

Amen.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, rev. edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1982), p. 79

[2] P. 66

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Year C Lent 1: temptation and perfection

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Notes for the sermon that won’t be preached tomorrow:

Was there never any danger that Jesus would succumb to the temptings and promptings and proddings of the devil?

We tend to trap ourselves in our language of perfection and innocence, of sinlessness and spotlessness, and turn Jesus into an invulnerable icon, an armoured superhuman with bullet-proof hide and a soul to match.

But if Jesus was in no danger from these temptations, if his fast left him as strong and as energetic as ever, if he responded so one hundred and eighty degrees differently than any one of us would or could, then what is the point to the story? Why tempt the untemptable? Why rejoice at the victory of the one for whom these is no match, no challenger worth the title? Where is the hope? What is the point?

Perhaps our language is missing something. Perhaps our idea of perfection is lacking. In Platonic thought, everything that exists on earth is a shadow, a copy of its perfect form, which exists in idea only, perfectly preserved and untouched by mortality or creation. It is a philosophy which has infected our idea of perfection and spread to our Christology, our descriptions of who Jesus was and is as the Son of God. We consider that in his perfection, he could have been no other, could have behaved and responded no other way; but then what would have been the point to his Incarnation, to his becoming human? Donald Mackinnon, citing another scholar named Cook-Wilson, pointed out that “once Plato had established the reality of the forms, his problem was to find any raison d’etre for the particulars which copied them, or partook of their being .. Christianity faces men with the paradox that certain events which could have been otherwise are of ultimate, transcendent import; and this without losing their character as contingent events.”[1]

[1] “Our Contemporary Christ,” in Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays, Donald MacKinnon, edited by George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011; orginal copyright 1968 Lutterworth Press), 87

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Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

A poem from a couple of years ago, when the only time in the day that I saw my husband was as our cars passed on opposite sides of the highway’s central divide. This year, he’s out of state. Oh for the days when we were close enough for our cars to pass like ships in the night!

Speed dating

I glimpsed you, hurtling through mile one eighty-five
on Valentine’s Day;
you were heading home to our half-fed children,
while I, running late as usual, raced toward the reddening sky,
glancing in my driving mirror.

Incidentally, the children did get fully fed, in the end.

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