Community Parson: Sin, suffering and Jesus on the cross: words from Julian of Norwich

Monday, March 30, 2015

Sin, suffering and Jesus on the cross: words from Julian of Norwich

Palm Sunday B

March 29, 2015

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Ps. 31:9-16

Philippians 2:5-11

Mark 14:1-15:47

The stark image of the dying Jesus on the cross brought comfort to medieval Christians in a way that is hard for us to understand. One faithful Christian, a woman named Julian, who lived and wrote in Norwich, England, in the 14th century, wrote that she desired three things: to recall Christ’s passion, to have a bodily sickness, and to have three wounds.

Now we moderns might long for union with Christ, but we would consider someone who wanted God to wound them and make them sick more than a little crazy. In 14th century Norwich, life could be described as more than a little crazy for everyone. Norwich was England’s second largest city, bustling and commercial, with a powerful bishop who assembled all the knights behind him to wage war against Flanders – and lost disastrously. The plague, over the course of a generation, killed 5,000 of the city’s 7,000 inhabitants. And if you dared to speak up against the aristocracy, or to read the bible in your own native language of English – those two movements were linked – that same disastrous bishop would have you burned for heresy. The ravaged body of Christ on the cross made sense to them.

If you were a 14th century Christian, you would know that God possessed two natures: God was wrathful toward sinners, and loving toward those who faithfully followed the teachings of the church.

Medieval accounts of Judgment Day present it as a time of justice, when God’s anger against sin is manifest. [Books and sermons in England in that time] set out to frighten [people] into virtue by evoking the event in all its terror, … full of warnings about God’s impatience with his corrupted creation.[i]

Given that, how else would anyone interpret the devastation of the plague, as anything except God’s wrath against sinners?

For Julian, who lived much of her life in a small room attached to a church, this question of sin was the primary puzzle of the Christian life:

… it seemed to me that if there had been no sin, we should all have been pure and as like our Lord as he created us. And so … I often wondered why, through the great and prescient wisdom of God, sin was not prevented; for it seemed to be that then all would have been well.[ii]

One powerful and difficult strand in Christian theology – one that is often quoted, and I guess believed, still today -- is that God demanded the bloody sacrifice of Jesus to atone for the sins of humanity. We might have been created pure and without sin, but that only lasted a few days in the Garden of Eden, and we just behaved worse and worse until God sent Jesus to die for our sins. Extreme Catholics might find expression for this in the crucifix, but extreme Protestants relish recounting in bloody detail the physical experiences of Jesus death.

There is not a little contradiction in this theology – and 14th century Julian, writing from a terrifying world where to question authority might send to your death, points it out clearly: why could did not God, great and prescient, prevent sin and then all would be well?

If you lay aside, for a moment, this thorny question of the inevitability of sin, and think about human nature, that disturbing picture of the dying savior softens a bit. Julian saw in vivid detail, and all of us would agree, that human suffering is inevitable. We all fall down and get hurt, we get ill – we don’t have to ask God for these things. They just happen. This world, where bad things happen, is the world where God placed us. But it is not the suffering that defines God; it is the love. Julian had visions, in which she heard Jesus speaking to her from the cross:

‘Would you know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it to you? For Love.’ … And I saw full surely in this [she continued in her own words], and in all, that before God made us he loved us, which love was never slaked nor never shall be. And in love he has done all his work, and in love he has made all things profitable to us. And in this love our life is everlasting. [iii]

Or as one very thoughtful scholar put it, “God is not now one thing, now another – now loving to the saved, now angry to the damned – but always the same, always love.”[iv]

The death Jesus died was a terrible death, ravaged and beaten, and, as the Gospel of Mark depicts it, pretty much abandoned and alone. But all of God’s creatures die, and all of us have some acquaintance with suffering. If God has created us in love, God loves us to the end, no matter what. No matter what. All will be well, Julian wrote from a time and place much worse than ours. All will be well, she wrote, even though people who questioned the church’s doctrine could be put to death. All will be well, and every manner of thing will be well.

[i] Nicholas Watson, from The Cambridge Companion of Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 214

[ii] Julian, Short Text, Ch. 13

[iii] Julian, Long Text, Ch. 86

[iv] Watson, p. 214

No comments:

Post a Comment

Missional church and the arts

What if we thought about church in another way, as "a small community that [moves] into a particular area (often one with a lot of deprivation and poverty) ... seeking to follow Christ but their focus is simply helping transform their community -- in arts, environment, in social needs, with youth and so on."

These are churches, as the English church missioner named Jonny Baker, "are not focused on growing big -- but more like the yeast of the kingdom that Jesus talked about infecting the wider batch of dough. ..." Such churches, Baker says, face "the challenge of weaning members off their addiction to consumer approaches to church where they get their fix of worship and teaching and meeting with friends before they could properly engage in this more local, outward-focused community approach (maybe we need a 12 step detox programme for leaving consumer church!?)"

We may benefit from thinking this way, as we explore how to connect our treasure, which is the Celebration of the Arts, into parts of the community that could use more art.

Thanks to the Patheos blog for sending this thought my way ...

"A prayer book even an atheist would love"

It does seem a teensy bit arrogant for a 21st century author to claim that he "edited" The Book of Common Prayer, but Brian Cummings seems to have added considerable value to familiar red book we find in our pews. In this 2011 volume (Oxford University Press), we can find the full texts of the 1549, 1559 and 1662 Prayer Books, along with introductions, explanations, notes and glossary. The review in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, gives the book a glowing recommendation -- both in its edited and "explained" form and in the original, which as the book upon which all prayer in our language is based "shaped the inner life and branded the tongue of the English-speaking peoples. Its phrases and rhythms did not merely enter the language. They largely defined the language. " Read more of the review here, and if you read it, let us know how you liked it!!

What I read - 2012

FINISHED:

At Simon's INSISTENCE I read The Hunger Games. Some parts I had to skim through, because the depictions of these young people fighting each other to the death was at times too gruesome, but it was overall well worth the read. NOW I have to get on with # 2 in the series

Dennis Lehane's A Given Day. Everything comes together in a slightly staged but effective way in 1919 Boston: anarchists, molasses, racism, repression and the Boston police strike. J. Edgar Hoover makes some unflattering cameos. I must say it is kind of Ragtime as it would be dramatized by Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Ben Affleck. It was in the days when you could tell what Boston block someone grew up on by the accent. The Irish don't come off all too well. Southie is a place to avoid in this prelude to The Depahted. It's good, though a little too graphically violent and written like a movie script. Let's just say Whitey Bulger came by his proclivities naturally.

Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

quite charming and lovely; a peek into the modest domestic life and extraordinary yearnings of a summer community of Orthodox Jews in the Catskills

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Also saw the Swedish version of the first book.

The reminders of domestic terror in the most intimate sense are deeply unsettling. The author reminds of the percentage of Swedish women who are abused, beaten, left for dead, even. It is an all-too-steady drumbeat beneath human society.

Meanwhile, I found a new collection of stories, that is easier to read before bed. I heard the most astounding story on Selected Shorts: "The Mappist" by Barry Lopez. You MUST read it. Before you know it, you are in another world, that shines the most wonderful light on this place we inhabit and how we live in it.

I had a brief flirtation with a few of Joyce Carol Oates short stories. Bracing. I am always on the look-out for her perceptive comments about upstate New York.

Done with Cheever, and LOVED it. Again. If you read nothing else, read "The Death of Justina." Then again, I also like, "Goodbye, My Brother." Cheever; the chronicler of a world falling apart.

This summer ...
Middlemarch by George Eliot. This wonderful story of the intertwined lives of villagers contains the requisite English characters of pompous rectors, impoverished strivers and beautiful young women. It's like reading Trollope: you'll find someone you know in Middlemarch.
and
The Collected Stories of John Cheever. A perennial favorite. Poignant stories of families in mid-century middle America. Reading it again is a bit like Mad Men, where you are glued, almost in horror, at the train wreck you know is about to happen in these people's lives.

Responding to the Unspeakable

The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in the days right before Christmas, with the deaths of small children and the people trying to protect them, wrench our hearts like nothing else. However we respond to this tragedy -- with silence, with weeping, with anger, with resolve to work so that something like this will never happen again -- all of our reactions are understandable. We need ways to regain our footing and imagine how we will live in the world as it is now, in this world in which we experience yet more grief and sadness.

On Sunday, December 16, the Prayers of the People at St. David's Church were in the words of parishioners and preachers, some from the very day of the tragedy. Find the text of those prayers on our Forming Disciples blog.