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.






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