The  Lord  is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works.
                                                 Psalms 145 [144]:13 ESV

So Jesus said to them,  “Truly, truly, I say to you,  the Son  can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father  does, that the Son does likewise.
                                                 John 5:19 ESV

I’ve been trying to read the gospel passage in Greek again. The construction, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you’ helps immensely: the repetition of ‘amen’ makes it pretty easy to spot. Not so with the rest (something about the Father and the Son…), and I didn’t really quite see where I was until I read the English. But in the midst of my back-and-forth, I noticed something. The word for ‘do’ in the passage is poeisis. A New Testament scholar might tell me that there is nothing special about the use of that particular word here, but I am just a simple lay theologian with very rusty Greek. And that little word reminds me of two (to me) remarkable things.

The word poeisis would not have caught my eye without John Milbank having called it to my attention in an essay called ‘A Christological Poetics‘. But, thanks to his challenging theological proposal, I read this passage of the Gospel according to John with different eyes. What Milbank says about poeisis in his essay is complex and brilliant, and bears reading. My two things are simple and not at all brilliant.

The first is that the ‘doing’ isn’t a factory-line kind of task. English doesn’t have the catch all word for doing and making like one finds in Spanish, for example. Hacer means ‘to do, to make’; translating it into English requires that we make a choice. There seems to me to be a sort of creativity here, to the work of the Father and the Son, that ‘doing’ doesn’t quite capture. (Again, Milbank says this sort of thing much better than I do.)

The second thing is that following Jesus means being caught up in this creative work of God. Even as the Son does only that which he sees the Father doing, so we imitate the Son as far as we are able to do. We participate in the divine poetry, the creative and redemptive work of God in and with the world. Being a Christian isn’t just about turning up on Sunday and trying to live a ‘moral’ life. It is about learning a craft, being apprenticed to a master craftsman. And we learn, through our clumsy and feeble attempts to copy the master, that it isn’t just about copying: this craft isn’t about perfecting our own skill, but allowing his skill to be perfected in us.

It isn’t about us. It’s always about Him. Deo gratias.

God is our refuge and strength,
  a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,
  though the earth should change,
And though the mountains slip
   into the heart of the sea…
                                 Psalm 45 [46]: 1-2

Today is my birthday. Snow is falling, and I am trying to work despite having a cold. Luckily I had a guest to teach my class this morning, a session on war and peace in the Orthodox tradition. From him I heard that a renowned mystic (Fr Sophrony) described war as fratricide. He lived through both world wars and the experience shaped him profoundly. In his writing, he seems to regard war as a symptom of the fallen human condition; its opposite is not armistice or treaty but the peace of Christ. Importantly, this peace–like the image of God’s presence through the upheaval of our earthly existence–does not depend on the cessation of hostilities between opposing powers, but is always and everywhere present.

Something like this presence of God, this inbreaking peace, must be the power at work in another story that came to my attention today, I think not by accident. It is worth reading this story of two pilots, one American and one German, who ‘met’ in the sky over Germany in December 1943. The American pilot and those left alive on his B-17 were saved by the German fighter pilot who took to the air to shoot them down.

Peace happens. Deo gratias.

Praise the Lord, Jerusalem!
    Zion, praise your God!
                             Psalm 147

The psalmist does recount the deeds for which God ought to be praised, it’s true. But those aren’t always what present themselves to us on any given day. Some days we hurt, physically or emotionally. Some days we’re just exhausted in body and in soul. The future looks bleak, or we feel alone. God may well have ‘strengthened the bars of [our] gates’, but it doesn’t seem to have made a difference today.

The psalmist is right, though, to call us to praise. Praise God, anyway: ‘Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High; and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall honor me’ (Psalm 49 [50]: 14-15). So I thank God for the tree outside my window, its bare branches silhouetted against a white sky. And in the same breath I call upon God, in this day of mundane trouble, of garden-variety joylessness: restore my hope in your salvation. You will rescue me, and I will honor you.

So Naaman came with his team and chariot and drew up at the door of Elisha’s house. And Elisha sent him a messenger to say, ‘Go and bathe seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will become clean once more.’ But Naaman was indignant and went off, saying, ‘Here was I thinking he would be sure to come out to me, and stand there, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the spot and cure the leprous part. Surely Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, are better than any water in Israel? Could I not bathe in them and become clean?’ And he turned round and went off in a rage. But his servants approached him and said, ‘My father, if the prophet had asked you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? All the more reason, then, when he says to you, “Bathe, and you will become clean.”’ So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, as Elisha had told him to do. And his flesh became clean once more like the flesh of a little child.

‘Go and bathe seven times in the Jordan…’ The instruction leaves Naaman outraged. Here he was, expecting a miracle, a spectacular healing. Maybe he’d heard about Elijah’s fiery victory over the prophets of Ba’al. (Now there’s a story.) Naaman’s servants respond to his indignation with reason: if he had asked you to do something extraordinary, you would have done it, wouldn’t you? Well, then, why not do the ordinary thing?

Perhaps something like this exchange might take place in the days or weeks leading up to Lent. What extraordinary thing can we give up or take on in order to be healed? This Lent, I really wanted to pray the office. Really. Never mind the fact that I have four young children–one is under two, and the eldest has Down Syndrome–and a half-time lecturing post that involves enough work to occupy me full-time. I love praying the office with the nuns when I am on retreat. The rhythm of prayer and quiet restores my soul in a way nothing else does. 

But I am not on retreat: I am standing on the banks of the muddy Jordan, with a toddler on one hip and the third edition of The Modern Theologians on the other. (The toddler is heavier, but only just.) There are Lenten disciplines prescribed by the church: special days of fasting and abstinence, the sacrament of reconciliation, opportunities for giving and praying within the parish. Lent isn’t about heroic deeds of asceticism, it’s about humility. Perhaps my failure to pray the office daily during Lent ought to remind me that Lent is about obedience, not about willpower. 

Time to go and bathe in the Jordan, I suppose: repentance and submission are the way to healing.

The heart is more decetiful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?
“I, the Lord, search the heart,
I test the mind,
Even to give to each man according to his ways,
According to the result of his deeds.”
                                                Jeremiah 17: 9-10

Jeremiah 17:9 might well be a contender for my favorite verse. It is certainly one that I have unintentionally committed to memory. The heart is deceitful above all else–I have found that to be true of my own heart in particular. From time to time I would read the responses of the celebrity of the week in one of the weekend editions of the newspaper. I was always amused at the responses to: ‘what would your superpower be?’ Easy, I thought: mind control. Then one week I read a response that put me to shame: ‘the power to make people’s dreams come true.’ And I realized that mind control would be incredibly useful: control of my mind.

The heart is more deceitful than all else, but God finds it out. And the interesting thing about it is that God rewards what comes out of the heart: the ways, the deeds. I am the first to admit that my heart is deceitful, and I know my own capacity for self-deception. Yet I, even I, ought to be able to read some of the clues, to interpret the tea leaves of my actions. If I am neglecting my family or lacking in love for them, if I am impatient with people or half-hearted in my work, I can discern something about the state of my heart. And I can look back and see now what I should have seen then: my heart was deceiving me, but the Lord–and probably a number of other people–saw clearly the thread running from the actions back to the misdirection of my own heart.

So there’s hope. Even for this deceitful heart: ‘Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed.’

‘But you,’ [Jesus] said, ‘who do you say that I am?’
Then Simon Peter spoke up.
‘You are the Christ,’ he said, ‘the Son of the Living God.’

                                                    Matthew 16: 15-16

Occasionally I try to make out the gospel passage in Greek. Unfortunately, it has been so long since I bothered that usually I am delighted just to spot the odd word, and that often only by sounding it out. Today was pretty much the same. I had already glanced at the English, so I thought I knew what was coming: σὺ εἰ ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ …so far, so good–you are the Christ, the Son of God. But there on the next line, the bit I’d glanced past in the English and wasn’t really expecting: τοῦ ζῶντος. Rusty as my Greek is, I spotted that zeta (the squiggle at the beginning of the second word, in case you’re wondering) and the omega following it, and the word came back to me: ‘living’. 

And I had that experience that I long for when reading the gospel: it leapt out at me. The Living God. Peter’s affirmation of Jesus’ divinity made me sit up and take notice. Something new is happening here; the identity of Jesus is coming to light. This is who Jesus is, and that changes everything. Everything. What does it mean to realize, down to the very depths of your soul, that this is the Christ, the Son of the Living God? 

For you take no delight in sacrifice; 

Is this not the fast which I choose,
   To loosen the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the bands of the yoke,
   And to let the oppressed go frre,
And break every yoke?
   Is it not to divide yout bread with the hungry,
And bring the homeless poor into the house;
   When you see the naked, to cover him;
And not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

I admit, this is not from the Mass readings for today, but from afternoon prayer. It struck me deeply, as I had just been in a conversation about beginning of life issues. These things trouble me deeply, as the mother of four children, the eldest of whom has Down Syndrome. How–the question was being asked–should we counsel people who are struggling to conceive and thinking of IVF? Or those worried about a serious or life-threatening condition? As I read the words of Isaiah, I was reminded that the human condition is one of vulnerability and often of suffering: when we see another person hungry or naked, we should see ourselves. (Didn’t Jesus say something about loving our neighbour…?)

I hesitate to offer any ethical reflection, actually. My own experience has been one in which I have received four gifts from God, each beautiful and cherished, and at the same time challenging. I had to reckon with the possibility of losing a baby in her first year of life. Thankfully, I never had to confront that reality. But it taught me something about having children–that they are gifts, not possessions, and having children is a privilege and a responsibility, never a right. So to say that the ‘fast’ of the childless might just be to cover the ‘nakedness’ of the orphan…well, it’s not something I can say, as theodicy-in-general is impossible. Only in hindsight are we able to make the kind of sense of tragic circumstances like barrenness, or being orphaned.

So I return to where I began: these things trouble me deeply, because there are no easy answers. Sometimes there aren’t even any hard answers, but only a very deep and painful silence into which our words and tears fall. Then we need the next verse of the passage from Isaiah:

Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
And your recovery will speedily spring first;
And your righteousness will go before you;
The glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.

In Lent we look for the Light, the dawn of our redemption, who is our recovery–healing!–and our righteousness, and in him all the fullness of God’s glory dwelt. Deo gratias.

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, and death and adversity…So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to him; for this is your life and the length of your days, that you may live in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give them.

Deuteronomy 30: 15, 19b-20

Choose life! This passage from Deuteronomy has always delighted me, because it seems so obvious. Why would anyone do otherwise? The fact that God has to command and persuade us to choose life hints at the pervasiveness of sin, and speaks to the truth of Paul’s experience, described in Romans 7. the good that we would do, we cannot; we find ourselves unable to choose life.

At first, the method of self-denial at the heart of our observance of Lent might not seem like the answer. But it isn’t about punishing ourselves, nor is it about our moral or spiritual ‘fitness’: Lenten discipline is not like so many days of a tough workout, after which we find ourselves stronger and faster. It isn’t something we do. Self-denial means self-emptying, putting ourselves more and more fully into God’s hands. We are not the source of the life we seek. Rather we turn to the source of life as we look to God to fill the empty space created by the things we’ve given up. Giving up beer or chocolate, or whatever else we choose to forgo during Lent, is not the end. We might lose weight, or develop healthier habits. But that isn’t what it’s about: giving things up is a means to a different end, and we can only realize that end if we allow ourselves to feel the space created by what we’re missing, and ask God to fill it.

So it is that self-denial is at the same time choosing life. To enter self-consciously, prayerfully, and wholly into a season of penitence is to be still in the place of emptiness, and look expectantly to the One who alone can fill us. Discipline makes way for fruitfulness, for growth, as today’s psalm reminds us:

How blessed is the one who
     does not walk in the
     counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the path of sinners,
     nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
But her delight is in the law of the Lord,
     and in his law she meditates day and night.
And she will be like a tree firmly planted
     by streams of water,
     which yields its fruit in season,
And its leaf does not wither;
     and in whatever she does, she prospers.