Monday, December 28, 2015
The Feast of Holy Innocents, Truly a Strange Feast?
In the Western Christian Tradition, a couple
days after Christmas, a special celebration takes place for what are called “The
Holy Innocents”. It refers to the babies who, according the Bible, were
murdered in and around Bethlehem when the then ruler, Herod, found out that one
of them was the “King of the Jews”. Feeling threatened by this birth but not
sure which child was the one, he decides to wipe out all potential usurpers.
This bout of ethnic cleansing, as we would now classify it, was like all such
events, a tragedy; so why do Christians make a celebration out of it? Is this another
case of Christianity glorifying pain and suffering?
In order to understand the thinking of
Christian tradition one needs to wrap one’s mind around the idea of martyrdom.
This concept, which literally (from the Greek) simply means witness, refers to
a person testifying to his or her faith by rather dying than denying it. So a
martyr is somebody who dies for his beliefs and convictions: in so doing he is
believed to be the ultimate follower of Christ who himself died for his
beliefs. In honoring martyrs one honors the courage of people who did not deny
their faith simply to save their skins.
But the respect of martyrs goes deeper:
they also show with their lives that Christianity cannot be suppressed by
violence and killing. Indeed one of the early Christian thinkers observed that “the
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” since the courage of martyrs traditionally
attracted new followers to that religion. The church does not simply celebrate
the faithfulness of its members, but the victory that they have won in
defeating their enemies through shedding their blood. What seems like defeat
actually turns out to be victory. Strange indeed!
I cannot help but turn my mind to
Christians in Syria and Iraq when I ponder today’s celebration. Does this mean
that we should be happy at the news of more Christian believers being killed or
driven out of their homes in that part of the world? Surely that would be
perverse; our hearts need to go out to them, and any support we can lend them
and their relatives must be provided. But there is a fine line between showing
sympathy to them and becoming alarmists, as if the most recent persecution was
going to threaten the very survival of God’s people in the Middle East and
beyond. If it is true that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,
then such calamities, in God’s miraculous way, only serve to strengthen and
revitalize the church.
So what should alarm us is not when
Christians are persecuted in the Middle East, but when their confreres in the
West succumb to materialism, immorality and lukewarmness, thus losing their
saltiness. It is not those whose witness is daily tested through hardship and
opposition we need to be concerned about, but those whose witness is subtly
eroded through ever greater conformity to the reigning spirit of the age. While
not looking or praying for persecution to come our way, we Westerners should
very carefully observe today’s feast and ask ourselves what it has to teach us.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Life- as Good as It Gets?
The
last few weeks have afforded me with a couple of opportunities to stop and
think. While I was in Beirut in November I dodged- not too narrowly, but dodged
nonetheless- a car bomb, which killed 40 people and injured hundreds. Just a
few days ago a good friend, a bit younger than me, died after battling cancer
for over a year. When that happens, everything suddenly moves into slow-motion
and you ask yourself the question “Is this it? Is this all life has to offer?
Is this as good as it gets?” For you this might have happened after a great
achievement, standing on the podium, and suddenly you wonder whether all you have
laboured for really amounts to that much. In other words we all have times when
life as we live it seems disappointing, trite, petty, and you wonder whether
there is somewhere, somehow more to it than this.
I
would contend that such musings reveal something fundamental about human
beings, or possibly about creation in general. Take a bamboo plant for example.
If you seek to get rid of it and cut it down to its base, pour poison onto the
stems and then pour concrete over them, it won’t take more than a couple of
years before the plant breaks right through the pavement and brings forth
new shoots. Bamboo cannot be held back by
its circumstances, rather something inside it causes it to seek the light and
grow tall. A similar phenomenon can be observed in human beings, who seem to
pursue something elusive such as light, meaning and purpose, and the daily
reality of their lives regularly falls short of their aspirations. “For the
creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” is
how the Bible, in the letter to the Romans, describes it. A famous North
African theologian, Augustine of Hippo, put it slightly differently: “Our hearts
are restless O Lord, and will be until they rest in you”.
Both of those passages express a conviction
that human beings, and maybe creation more broadly, are designed to tend toward
something beyond themselves, and whether you call it God, eternity or meaning
is ultimately irrelevant. And this drive regularly bumps into the harsh reality
of everyday life, thus leaving us disappointed, hurt and exhausted. To quote
Paul in the letter to the Romans again, “the whole creation has been groaning
in labor pains until now”. The pain and disappointment we experience are not an
accident, nor just some existential angst, they are rather the birth pangs of a
creation yet to be fully unpacked and grown up.
The
question is what we do when we experience such birth pangs. In the Western
world every pain needs to be medicated and numbed, and we have developed
elaborate mechanisms to do so: for some of us its simply work that keeps us from
dealing with the pain, for others its shopping, drinking or drugs. But a whole
industry is there to distract us and make us forget that maybe there is more to
life than what we can see. So rather than facing existential questions, we pour
ourselves another glass of Chardonnay or start the next episode of “Orange Is
the New Black”. How convenient!
The
alternative to numbing existential pain is to allow it to help us pursue
meaning. The deep questions we pose ourselves about our vocation, about
suffering, about what our life amounts to, are there to make us discover the
meaning of life, if only we let it. “We hope that creation itself will be set
free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the
children of God” says Paul, and giving room to such fundamental questions
awakens and strengthens our hope.
Traditionally
Christians have taken the weeks before Christmas to ask themselves deep questions
such as “What happens when I die?, Is there
life after death? How do I tell that a life/my life was successful?” The
goal is not to get depressed or unable to handle daily reality, but to look
beyond it to what really matters. So consider leaving the Chardonnay in the
fridge and Netflix switched off, so you can ponder how good life can get.
