Acts 6:1-7
Psalm 30:1-12
Mark 15:43-16:8

Taking Courage

Between fruit harvests and Turmeric weeding and composting and fighting back the jungle, not to mention our prayer life and ministries, we give thanks for our trips to the one city on our island. For there, we have a full day — trucking fruit to market and returning with hundreds of pounds of fish by-product for compost — to devote to retreat and reflection. I wish I could say that every day was a day of contemplating only God at the Hermitage, but that would be far from the truth. This morning on this Sunday when we honor the Myrrh-bearing Women, I bow to the Sisters of Na Pua Li'i Hermitage, who .... I might have said could outwork the men we have hired, but in fact they have outworked every young man we have hired!

Now, the bedrock for all our reflections is our understanding that God is our Father and Mother. We get nowhere in spiritual life until we understand and cherish this great truth. God made us "in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Gen 1:27)." We are created with the royal Image stamped upon us, and this is our destiny, if we will step up to it: to become united with God, following the example of Jesus, until we are indistinguishable from Him. What then are the traits that mark this spiritual transformation? In one recent trip to market we pondered this question: "What are qualities in us that God most cherishes?"

Now, we would need much more than a single day of retreat to ponder such a open-ended question thoroughly if it were not for the fact that God has set a boundary here. For two thousand years ago, God chose to reveal these qualities in perfect clarity. It was for this reason that God entered human history as a man, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, Who was God but fully man, set out for all to behold what humans were made to be. As Pontius Pilate said, "Ecce Homo!" ("Behold the Man!")

This understanding of the Advent of God was repeatedly attested by the the earliest inspired Fathers. You see, humankind had lost its way, they wrote. Humans had even forgotten what they were supposed to look like. They had fallen into a vast identity crisis, we would say today. Origen likened humans to coins that had slowly become dull slugs of silver, once bearing the Image of the Great Emperor, but now indecipherable. With the appearance of God's Son, the coin was restruck stamping the royal Image upon it, once again. For Jesus, the first-born of God's children, the King of Kings, is the perfect Image of the Great Emperor. And He is the great exemplar among His adopted siblings.

Using another analogy, St. Athanasius wrote

As our retreat reflection commenced, immediately kindness was proposed. When people think of holiness, often kindness and compassion are the first things that come to mind. If holiness is defined as nearness to God, Who alone is All-Holy, then surely the love He bears for His children might be seen in His kindness and compassion. And we are taught that the First Great Commandment, and our love of God, is "like unto" the Second, which is our love of neighbor.

But is Jesus always kind and compassionate? The answer is plainly, "No." Indeed, Jesus often is the fiercest among prophets.

As a theological sidebar, if we are to accept the theological principle that God the Father is perfect in His serenity, cannot suffer or be subject to emotion, and that Jesus is the visible Image of the invisible God ... but in human form, then we must conclude that the rage and anger and disappointment and hurt that God displays atop Mount Sinai are, in fact, the Triune's God's many moods expressed in the human Person of the Son. And is it not Jesus Who meets with Moses and Elijah as familiars on the Mount of Transfiguration? Moreover, the human scale of the Creation, which so comforts us in its strange familiarity, was executed by the Son, not the Father. Jesus, the Eternal Word of Creation, was the Instrument which made all things.

In parallel with the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the West has seen the development of a Jesus that is "fairer than meadows and woodlands" and "the blooming garb of spring" ("Fairest Lord Jesus"), giving away a certain yearning in the hearts of men who now lived in cities ... "dark Satanic Mills," Blake said. But this modern invention is not the Jesus we find in the Gospels and is not the way the ancients thought of Him. The earliest surviving depiction of Jesus is an icon called the Pantocrator. The left side of the Image Jesus is judgment as His piercing and all-seeing eye penetrates our souls, and the right side is blessing. His face blesses, but it is not a happy face, a gladsome face, but a grave, regal, perhaps aloof blessing. To those who have been unfaithful to Him, He will say,

I once challenged a group of parishioners years ago who found this hard to believe. Make a little book, I told them. On one side write down all the passages in the Gospels where you find the meek and lowly Jesus depicted, the little man who just wants everyone to be happy, and on the other, all of His prophetic sayings. And they were amazed when they completed this exercise.

"But how can this be?!" the newcomer to Christianity will ask. "Isn't Jesus the meek and mild One who just wants everyone to love each other?" Well, yes, in a way, but we find a great division drawn across the entire Creation from its beginning to the present time. On one side of this all-important line is the world that God intended, and still intends, which we associate with His Primordial Will. Then, there is the other side of the line, which has rejected God, as Eve did, deciding they will take their own path through life, making their own laws, inventing their own morals. This side we associate with God's Providential Will, as God-the-Patient-Father provides each of us a lifetime to return to Him. (Of course, the trick here is we have no way of knowing how long that is.) These two worlds are irreconcilable, living side-by-side, for the time being.

To be sure, God has made everyone in His Image. Every person born into the world is intended to be, made to be, God's son or daughter. Everyone, we learn in the Gospels, is invited to the Great King's feast. Sadly, every single guest has declined to attend as they are distracted by the worldly lives they live, neglecting God:

It was not always this way. From the beginning, the Father contemplated a world that was in harmony with Him and in harmony with itself. But God's love for us, which is ever-present, and the love of God are required, for this is the stuff which holds everything together.

Thus, we cannot say, across the board, that Jesus is kind or compassionate. He rebukes, He rejects, He casts out those who love the world. Remarkably, Jesus does not pray for the world:

But if kindness or compassion are not the highest marks of godliness in humankind, then what? Well, perhaps it is love. After all "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8). And the Lord tells us

You see, love is not a kind of cosmic wildcard: "Love everyone, and by this you will change the world!" It feels good to say. It is easy to say, and I have said it myself. But anyone who has actually attempted this — and among this group I would number the majority of vowed religious and clergy — ... they will find that, yes, love is a powerful and transforming force, yet, as often as not, it will lead to destruction for the ones who pour it out freely.

As we observe the prodigal son's patient father, we see that love is a fine artform, which must be mastered. It is not a bucket of paint to be poured out on everything and everyone. The father, for example, does not trail the son into barrooms and brothels to demonstrate solidarity, to show that he is "pro love." He does not lie in the mud eating hog-slop beside him, showing that "love does not fail." The father does not follow the son pleading with him, the picture of we have Jesus in our time, "Please love me!" Like Father God, he provides enough life and experience such that his son might discover pure and godly love and, in that light, reveal to himself the errors and sins he has committed against his father and which grieve Heaven. No, love, in and of itself, is not the defining mark of divine transformation. And we must note that there are many who love but who are, in that love, very distant from God. Many who love .... but who are distant from God.

Then what is the quality we seek? Is it purity of life which Father God cherishes above all else? Surely He is purity itself and cannot abide filthiness in us ... cannot dwell in an unclean heart or a mind full of unclean thoughts. But on reflection, we must admit that purity is more an outcome than an end in itself. For we can imagine people who practice purity, letting no unclean thing come near to them, but who fail to be godly. Our own world, for example, has no shortage of narcissists who obsess over purity in their diet and exercise regime.

Jesus sets this scene for us on a road near Jericho. A priest comes along and finds a man badly beaten and bleeding amongst the sharp rocks of that desert place. He must face a decision: if he should touch this bleeding man, he will become ritually unclean and unable to perform his offices when he arrives to the Temple. For him the choice is between two Great Commandments: to love God completely or to love his neighbor as himself. He chooses to give a wide berth to the bleeding man. Likewise, a Levite comes upon the same scene. He faces the same dilemma, for he is a sacred minister of the Temple and would be unable to perform his function if he should touch the bleeding man. He too gives the bloody figure a wide berth. What, then, is the solution to the riddle? Jesus points out that purity itself, practiced in isolation, will not lead to God. For it is the Samaritan, a man held to be a Gentile by the priest and Levite, who by touching the suffering and wounded man fulfills both God's Great Commandments. Does this nullify the practice of purity? No. But it does suggest that purity should be practiced, not in isolation, but first in consulting the heart of God. Indeed, Jesus says, purity can become an unwholesome cult when it is divorced from God:

So, what else remains? Kindness, compassion, love, purity .... What, then, is the one, ever-present, never-changing constant which marks one as resembling God, fulfilling the family resemblance that God has set upon us at birth? Let us consider the whole of salvation history. Let us set before us the whole of Sacred Scripture. What can we say? What stands out ... from Eden to East of Eden; from the evil world before the Flood to the rainbow; from bondage in Egypt to the Red Sea; from rebellion in the Sinai Wilderness to the Land of Promise? Well, the list of God's constancy goes on and on and on .... What does this panoramic picture reveal? That the Scriptures are not the story of a faithful people, but rather of a faithful God. Faithful! It is the story of a Parent, sometimes depicted as a Father, sometimes as nourishing Mother, who loves us and whose love can never fail, come what may. Yes, our Father or Mother may not be able to bless everything that we say and do. God cannot control our willfulness and dark impulses, much less our darker compulsions to reject Him, for He has given us the gift of sovereign freedom. In the end, though, God's faithfulness never waivers. St. Paul tells us it cannot fail, whether it is the infinitely patient parent standing at a roadside awaiting the return of a son (Lu 15:11-32) or the long suffering husband of an unfaithful wife (Jeremiah 2 and Hosea 2) or the God Who pledges to "unremember" all our sins (Isaiah 43), the one constant — and a trait that we are able to emulate — is God's faithfulness. For He has given us a Book of Life. And all we need do is live it.

As we read, the Great King's guests have all declined to attend His feast. It is a sad record that when He sent His Son, the Heir, to the Vineyard, all declined to grant Him the reverence and obeisance which was His due ... save three mysterious kings from the East. By the end nearly all will reject Jesus ... nearly all will abandon Him. I say "nearly," for there were the few, the very few — the one who did not care about decorum but knelt on the ground, washing His feet with her hair and tears; the one who did not count the cost of precious spikenard from India (a man's salary for a year); the ones who dared to pour out their devotion before the face of Temple police though they might be tortured and killed; the ones who wept at the foot of the Cross; the ones who faithfully bore myrrh to the tomb before first light. In a world of unfaithfulness, represented by nearly every follower of Jesus during His lifetime, we celebrate today the women who bore the myrrh, who stood at the foot of the Cross, who were ever-faithful .... and never wavering, come what may. And we may be sure that Father God saw His own faithful heart beating in these gentle bosoms.

"What is the highest and the best in humankind? What is it that marks one as belonging to God?" I asked one Hermitage Sister during a recent retreat. "Faithfulness," she said. "It is faithfulness."

In a world that plainly has repudiated God, making a mockery of His Book of Life, let us take courage from the women who bore myrrh to the tomb, from the others who where faithful upon pain of their lives, from Joseph of Arimathea who "took courage and went to Pilate," and to faith-in-God itself, for this alone will lead to all the other virtues — faithfulness and courage .... which we saw in the Seraph Abdiel (through the holy prism of John Milton's inspired art), the angel who stood alone among Lucifer's party defying wicked plans for a war in Heaven: