Bright Evening Star Read online

  Jesus marveled at the faith of this soldier, and this was the first indication that the Good News was for everybody, not just for any one particular group. It was for everybody who would listen and believe. And Jesus’ mission was expanded, as it was when the Syro-Phoenician woman who had been begging him to heal her daughter reminded him that even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables.

  This is one of the most amazing of the stories because it emphasizes Jesus’ promise to be human, with all human limitations. He was brought up to be a good Jewish boy worshiping the great Jewish Jehovah, and he and his people were surrounded by other people who worshiped different and lesser gods, and who were therefore beneath them. He was taught to know and love Scripture and to believe that the prophecies were going to be fulfilled. The psalms were his familiar hymnal, and he would have known not only the affirmative, loving psalms, but the angry ones as well, and he would have been acquainted with Psalm 44 which begins,

  We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what work you did in their days, the times of old, how you drove out the heathen with your hand and planted your people in….For your people got not the land in possession by their own sword, neither did their own arm save them, but your right hand.

  Did that psalm give the settlers in the New World the right to drive the “heathen redskins” from their homes? Did it urge the British to expand their empire? Who are the heathen? Those who do not know and honor the holy and undivided Trinity? Weren’t some of Jesus’ parables about heathens? Samaritans? Lepers? Others? What did Jesus think? Didn’t God make everything, and all of us? Didn’t God come to us as Jesus to call us all to be el’s children?

  That psalm has always bothered me. Do we feel justified and superior when we talk about the heathen? when we justified having slaves? Does it explain some of the centuries-old hatreds in Bosnia? Africa? the U.S.A.?

  The Promised Land was already occupied. Was it all right to take it over because it was occupied by the heathen? I don’t know the answers to my questions. Is a group of Protestant soldiers raping a convent of Catholic nuns in Iona less or more heathen than the primitive savages on a far-flung island?

  Jesus’ choice of “others” as protagonists of his stories is all the more remarkable. In his human self he had a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn, and much of it must have been painful for him. He was far ahead of his time, as were the early abolitionists who saw that slavery was terribly wrong long before most good churchgoing people recognized it. There lies the impact of the Syro-Phoenician woman and her passionate request which gave the human Jesus the unexpected message that his mission was not just for Jews. And I am reminded again of God telling Abraham (in Genesis 12:3) “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” The message of God’s love is for all the nations, for the whole world.

  When we creatures were made with free will, the ability to make choices and decisions, God gave up control in a way so radical we have never quite understood it as we continue to strive for power. When God saw what a miserable mess we were making by clinging to power, Christ threw power away once again and came to us to show us that power was literally killing us.

  So Christ left power and came to us as Jesus, to be our Redeemer. Christ our Redeemer: we say the words too glibly. What do they mean? How is Jesus our Redeemer?

  If I sell a family watch to a pawnbroker, it has to be “redeemed.” I have to return the price I received for it, and more. In the days when grocery shoppers were given green stamps they could be redeemed for some kitchen appliance, a blender, a set of mixing bowls. Redemption is a reminder that you don’t get something for nothing. Jesus came to redeem us by offering his human life as the price, the whole life, from conception to resurrection. In the Beatitudes he tries to show us how we are to understand what he is doing.

  Redemption has to do with Jesus’ presence in our lives. It means that Jesus sees us as we really are, and loves us anyhow. Not only that, Jesus sees whatever is best in us, and by seeing it, brings it forth and continues to redeem us with his life, his pain and his joy, so that we have the possibility of becoming who we really are meant to be.

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  For years on our drive from New York to Crosswicks, my husband and I looked sadly at a once-beautiful old colonial house where almost all the paint had come off the clapboards. The sills sagged. It was a house in such terrible condition that we were afraid that one day when we drove by we would find that it had collapsed on itself. Instead, one day we found that the house had been bought, and we saw a family busy painting, hammering, bringing the house back to life and beauty. They had looked at the decrepit building and seen what it could be, and were remaking it into the once-lovely building that had nearly been destroyed by time and neglect. They bought the house and they redeemed it. The payment was love and labor as much as money.

  That’s not a perfect metaphor, but it helps.

  Jesus sees what we might have been, and by being, himself, what we might have been and ought to have been but woefully were not, he offered us redemption by his very being. Dare we receive it?

  Sometimes my husband and I would see a house which was once beautiful but which had gone beyond the possibility of rebuilding, was falling in on itself, with holes in the roof, broken windows, a house that was too close to collapse to be brought back to life. That metaphor would seem to reflect such human failures as child abusers or drug pushers shot to death by competing drug pushers. But here I am stopped by my absolute belief that God in his love is not going to abandon anyone. I am only one of God’s stiff-necked people, so I do not know how God is going to accomplish this. If God has made us in the divine image, with free will, then God accepts our free choices. I have known parents struggling for years to find a runaway adolescent, to try to help a confused son or daughter turn away from drugs, to continue with anguish and prayer to do what is best for their most difficult children. And, as Jesus reminds us, we are only human parents trying our best, so how much better than ours is God’s forgiveness and love and generosity. If I have need of proof that God is love, it is that God is still with us in all our sin and folly. Surely an angry God would have wiped us out long ago.

  I saw another house that had been burned and was a horrifying blackened ruin as I drove past. Each time I drove by I saw the charred wreck and was saddened. Then one day I saw that the remains had been stacked together in a tidy but still terrible pile. Soon afterwards I saw the beginning of a new structure, and at last there was a clean white house with daffodils blooming around the door. It was spring, and I saw redemption.

  Over and over Jesus shows us love and redemption. God thinks we are worth redeeming. Alleluia! O thou, most holy and beloved, my Companion, my Guide upon the way, my bright evening Star!

  Jesus talked about houses. He told his listeners that those who heard his words and followed them were like a householder building a house on a rock, where it would withstand wind and rain. But those who heard his words and did not follow them were like someone building a house on sand, and when the storm came the house had no foundation, and fell.

  Jesus told stories of warning and he told stories of encouragement. The good shepherd goes out into the night after the lost sheep, out into the rain and wind and dark until the sheep is found, and he carries it home rejoicing.

  This is one of the loveliest of Jesus’ stories, but evidently some of the ninety-nine good sheep resented it. Why should the shepherd just go off and leave them all in order to find the bad sheep who had left the fold?

  That was more or less the view of the elder brother who resented the party the father was throwing for the selfish and spendthrift prodigal son when he returned home.

  Jesus assured those who followed him of the love of the heavenly Father, which was so much greater than theirs. “If your child asks for a fish will you give him a serpent? And you’re only a fall
ible human father. How much more does the heavenly Father love you!”

  When Jesus told his stories he was often misunderstood, so misunderstood that the very people he came to save with his deepest love were the first to turn against him. It may not have been because they did not understand him as his disciples did not understand him, but that they understood him too well. They couldn’t stand his having turned everything upside down and inside out. It threatened their power which was held in balance both by the Roman overlords, and then by their fellow Jews. Because of their insistence on the law, the letter of the law, their power depended on keeping everything right side up, everything in its proper box, put on the shelf in the right order. If they let him turn things inside out it would be the end of their power. So they began to hate him.

  He was surrounded by throngs, but how many heard what he actually said, rather than what they expected him to say?

  Who is he? they asked each other.

  They found only paradox and contradiction. If we think of Jesus as the Son of God as any young man is the son of his father, we anthropomorphize. Perhaps because we are human beings, that is inevitable, is the only way we can understand. But it is far more than that. He is the Son of the One who created the stars in their courses, and yet, as Christ, he was Creator of the stars and without him was not anything made that was made. We will never understand with our finite minds that, yes! he shouted the magnificence of the universe into being, and yet, as Jesus, he left this fiery home and came to our little blue planet as an ordinary mortal.

  Everything is more than it seems, and we get occasional glimpses, revelations, but when we try to analyze and explain them we lose them. Angels were his chariots, and he rode upon the wings of the cherubim, and he is further away from us than galaxies billions of light years away, and he is as close to us as the beating of our own hearts.

  He is with us because of a love beyond our comprehension, and it is only through our own love that we are able to know him at all. And it isn’t even our own love; it is Jesus’ love, expressed through us.

  So what has happened to us?

  Why are we not alive with joy?

  7

  FIFTY BILLION GALAXIES

  Joy comes often when it’s least expected: When a family member arrives safely, after having driven through a major snowstorm; when an unexpected piece of music comes on the radio, music that is tied in with a time of happiness; when I am kneeling at the altar with a friend. And I thank you, Jesus, for being born for me, for living all the way to death and dying for me because you were willing to be a mortal human being. And thank you for defying death by your resurrection, and for assuring us that as you went through life and death for us, you are calling us into the resurrection life with you. Thank you for leaving the glories of the galaxies and coming to us as one of us.

  One of us? And who is us? We are, you and me, and the street people, and the farmers, and the executives with their briefcases, and the fourteen-year-old girl carrying her baby, and those who work hard to support their churches. And, oh, yes, the pagans and the junkies and those on the other side of the planet and the atheists and the searchers and…and…All of us.

  Thank you, Jesus, for coming to us and loving us and healing us. Thank you for all that we do not understand.

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  Jesus left the amazement and excitement of his healings and went with his disciples to Peter’s house. Peter’s mother-in-law was sick with a fever and Jesus rebuked the fever and it left her and she immediately began to cook and serve them a meal.

  Where was Peter’s wife? Since she is not mentioned in the story it seems likely that she had died, as women so often died early in those days, frequently in childbirth. As far as we know, none of the inner circle of disciples, none of the Twelve, was married. They were young men, free to follow their Lord.

  That evening, fulfilling the prophecies of Isaiah, Jesus continued to heal the sick and the lame.

  In the morning, long before the sun was risen, he went to a lonely place where he could be alone with his Father and pray.

  And here we come to another paradox, another upside-downness. We refer to Jesus as the Son of God, but Jesus referred to himself as the Son of Man, the son of us mortals for whom he had come, and I think we need to pay attention to what Jesus called himself. For this is the great mystery. Jesus who was mortal, Jesus who was God.

  Jesus, who was seldom recognized by the mortals he came to save, and who was recognized by the demons he rebuked, is an eternal paradox. There is no separating his two natures, for they were his simultaneously. But in steadfastly referring to himself as the Son of Man, he was referring to his promise to be human for us, human all the way. He not only resisted Satan’s temptations, all of which were to reject his humanness and do something magic and flashy, but he refused every temptation put in his path to drop his mortality and show himself in terms of Satan’s false perceptions of divinity. Satan left heaven because he did not understand God; he knew only his own pride. And so he kept tempting Jesus with his own faulty understanding which stopped him from being either human or divine.

  Once again I struggle with the extraordinary nature of Jesus, Jesus as God, and Jesus as the Son of God. How can that be? What does it mean? Jesus is Lord, Jesus is lover, Jesus is judge.

  If Jesus was the Son of God, how was he the Son, when he was also God? When he called himself the Son of Man (man generically, male and female) he meant what he said and he wanted us to understand. Literalism is no help here. Nor is futile speculation about his mother with either fear or overadulation. Jesus’ conception was not a case of heavenly fornication. It was not the way it is with human sexuality. Again it is mystery expressed in paradox. It is our story, an amazing story. It is the only way to tell the untellable.

  The magnificence and magnitude of God’s love are beyond our powers of comprehension but not beyond our faith. When I read various scholarly articles about the facts of Jesus’ birth and life, I find myself unmoved. The Incarnation is so far beyond our factual comprehension as to be laughable. No number of Ph.D.’s will help us to prove it in academically acceptable terms.

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  What we are doing now in our attempts at inclusiveness has produced even more confusion. I am for inclusiveness, for understanding that God pronounced Adam and Eve to be male and female, made in the image of God, each different, each wonderful, each essential to the full image of the Maker.

  Recently I read a book which suggested that Mary Magdalene was one of the apostles. This radical idea was met with such horror at the beginning of the nineteenth century that it had to be repressed. A woman as an apostle! The idea repelled, terrified. But neither could a woman in those days be a physician or a lawyer or most of the things that women today take for granted. Why is this speculation about Mary Magdalene such a horrifying idea? From what we have been able to learn it seems quite likely that she could have been one of the apostles, and she was surely one of the leading figures in the early church. It’s not unimportant that Mary Magdalene was the first person to whom the risen Jesus appeared.

  The dominance of Mary Magdalene has been underplayed because the female of the species was not thought of as Sophia (Wisdom), much less Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom). Women have been denigrated and put down by the masculine world, kept in their “proper places,” whatever those were.

  If this attitude is changing, if we wake up to the fact that Jesus’ mission was as much to women as to men, that his attitude toward women was unheard of in his time, are we not changing our image of God and of the human race as having been made in the image of God? An outer image? Surely not! We can change what we believe to be the image of God, and have been doing that for thousands of years, but God has not changed, only our vain attempts at final definition.

  If we change our understanding through our attempts at defi
nition, we will also radically change the church institution as it has continually evolved over the centuries. There comes a moment when all institutions need changing, but such change is inevitably fraught with danger. It can be disastrous as well as creative, and once we admit that change is needed, we are open to both possibilities. It is not merely a matter of switching the emphasis from male to female, but of acknowledging both, of helping each to love the other, to marry, as the prince and princess must do in the fairy tales, so that we have the wisdom and intuition of women and the intellect and reasoning of men, and all the mixes that come with both.

  As I read and reread the Gospels it becomes more and more clear that this is what Jesus calls us to do and to be.

  Perhaps a lack of understanding of this vulnerable kind of marriage is what causes so many human commitments to break down. As I look back on my own forty years of marriage I am realizing only now how amazing my husband was for his time, willing to try to work out the balance of true partnership. Not that we always succeeded, but we did try, not by mathematical balance, but by love and understanding. We discovered quickly that neither one of us wanted to be the dominant one or to have controlling power over the other. Wielding power is not love but is, indeed, a kind of sadism.

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  Hugh was a wonderful father and we were blessed that our ideas of how to bring up our children coincided—that was a great gift. I am ever grateful that we were not like my parents with all their conflicting ideas about child raising! Hugh and I believed that love with discipline should be first and foremost. We didn’t think much of the prevailing permissiveness, where the child was allowed to express any feelings without curb. We were severely scolded by progressive friends who told us that it was old-fashioned of us to try to teach our children to be courteous.