4 Lent

This is the Sunday variously known as mid-Lent, Refreshment Sunday or, here in the UK, "Mothering Sunday". Sometimes we call it "Good Shepherd" Sunday. When my friend Larry Turpin was at Rogers Park Presbyterian Church in Chicago, he said it was the Sunday he got to preach about the big stained glass window depicting good old Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Here in the UK we have to weave the theme of motherhood into all this.

There is something comforting and protective about shepherds. No wonder it is the shepherd image they use for Refreshment Sunday. In the normal rigours of Lent we feel exposed, alone and on trial. The image of the shepherd enables us to revert to the security of our childhood when we were simply cared for, no matter what. We're given a break. And the association with mothering is a natural. I remember growing up in the 1950s when this sort of attitude toward the function of religion as a protective blanket to which we could return week by week as a refreshing retreat from the nasty realities of the Cold War and adult life in general was normal, that everyone had the Twenty-Third Psalm off by heart. I mean everyone. And it was everyone's favourite, just as Roy Rogers was supposed to be our favourite cowboy. The Twenty Third Psalm enshrines this sort of religion-as-mothering-comfort blanket.

The image of the Good Shepherd is not unique to the Bible. It was THE standard image for political leaders throughout the Middle East in biblical times. It's the archetypal paternalistic image, the Chicago alderman who is there to serve and protect you--never mind the corruption. It presumes the powerlessness of the populace. It's the standard image for kingship for cultures like those that took Ba'al (by a variety of names) as the model for kingship in states that duplicated on earth the pattern of heaven. What is important to remember on Refreshment Sunday is the degree to which the Yahwist Revolution challenged such a political/religious model. The Good Shepherd image in the Bible, consequently, is not as common as it is elsewhere in the religious discourse of the Middle East in this time. More often than not, as in Ezekiel, the shepherds undergo prophetic criticism for their failures in serving and protecting. Much of the prophetic literature serves to undercut the propaganda value of the shepherd image. The Twenty Third Psalm is therefore a-typical of biblical literature, though biblical literature is always a mixed bag. The Ba'al stuff has a way of creeping back in. It was, for obvious reasons, very much a part of the royal theology from which much of our psalmody emerges. Having said that, it is a nice psalm. But watch it.

The lessons for the 4th Sunday of Lent include 1 Samuel 16.1-13, Ephesians 5.8-14 and John 9.1-42 as well as Psalm 23. 1 Samuel 16.1-13 is the story about Samuel anointing the boy shepherd as the unlikely new king. The shepherding business ties this lesson in with the 23rd psalm, and the bit that says the Lord doesn't judge by what the eyes see (verse 7) links it to the gospel lesson, the healing of the man born blind. It is important to remember the political culture of the Good Shepherd image as briefly sketched above when reading this story. David was a kind of King Arthur figure in Hebrew literature, and this standard political image has shaped the legend of his origins. The legend of David's humble birth and so on is perhaps the standard story for the birth of a hero--a story that sparked the political legend of Abraham Lincoln being so legitimately a leader simply because he had been born in a log cabin. It was said that Richard Nixon had been born in a log cabin that he build with his own hands at the age of 12. It's the same kind of "birth of a hero" mythology that gets Jesus born in a stable when there was no room at the inn--a curious but typical juxtaposition with having him born in Bethlehem--David's home town--just the right mix of typical humility and glory. (Theologically, Jesus had to be born in Bethlehem, but was most likely born in Nazareth.) In any case, it is difficult to see this story of the calling of David standing outside the general fabric of middle eastern propaganda. If we go for the business about appearances being deceiving and the Lord judging by the heart rather than what the eyes see, then it is important also to get behind what the emotions see in presentations of legends like this. The implications of taking this story naively can be disastrous, as the story brings with it this whole baggage of a politics of domination and infantalisation. As a resting point in the Lenten way of the cross it may provide us with a welcome stopping place to be coddled and mothered. An awful lot of Christianity never gets beyond this sort of thing, though. It's like having our spiritual life dominated by an image like Michaelangelo's Pieta--a mothering presence that comforts us in our dying becomes the primary and perhaps primal icon of our faith, smothering initiative and vitality and never allowwing us to grow up. Dipping back into childhood security is therapeutic on occasion, perhaps. God knows, we need comforting. But not as a permanent state of affairs.

The gospel lesson, the story of the man born blind, is typically John. The framework of the story, the literal healing of blindness, falls off like a booster rocket or the discard skin of a snake or the elaborate details of a shaggy dog story that exist only to launch the pun at the end of the joke. In this case the joke is on the Pharisees and the story is about the difference between insight and sight. When in the beginning of the gospel John has the disciples of John the Baptist ask Jesus where he is staying ("abiding", as in "abide with me", later), he invites them to "come and see", a spiritually charged invitation that leads these disciples on a pilgrimage of discovery, learning ("seeing") by doing, in the Johannine sense that faith is both actualised and understood in what one does, and not otherwise, and what one does is what Jesus does. As someone else put it, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

The story is not just another Johannine tirade against fundamentalism. It is a story about how official structures and institutionalised orthodoxies get in the way of praxis as a path to understanding. The story becomes a kind of trap for the reader looking to Jesus in his Messianic role as fixer (Good Shepherd) who does it for us, for on this level the story is simply a miracle story, another demonstration of Jesus' power. An interpretive matrix that grows out of a value system with domination of the other (the Ba'al story) at its heart, is bound to read this story as simply one more example of a miracle-working saviour.

But the ending of the story throws all this out, cancelling what has come before. The Pharisees, like the literal-minded readers of this story, are the ones who are blind. The so-called miracle story and its power ideology becomes a parable of the kind of spiritual blindness in which institutional structures and stiff loyalties to traditional power and authority stand against healing in compassionate lives shaped by the needs of others. Worshipping Jesus does not mean waiting on him (as the standard Messiah) to do it for us. Worshipping Jesus means doing what he does. That means growing up, becoming adult, responsible Christians. The best mothers enable this to happen. The best churches enable this to happen. Sadly, Mother Church too often smothers the kind of Christian maturity that seems to me the constant and compelling message of our sacred texts.

Blog Title

Keith Kimber floated into my office this morning suggesting I ought to sign up for one of these free blogs--a total waste of time as far as I am concerned. I started a personal website a few years ago (www.pie-in-the-sky.org.uk) which I have never found the time to finish or keep up to date. How in the world am I going to find time for THIS?

Let me explain, at any rate, the title. Bob Ash and I thought up this Christ "Я" Us thing about ten years ago in Birmingham as an expression of our shared commitment to radical, contemporary theology. The "Я", of course, is supposed to be backwards, as the phrase is a take-off on Toys "Я" Us. In the commercial logo I assume the "us" means the store. In "Christ Я Us" it means the body of faithful people, the covenant community, the fellowship of the holy spirit, that embodies the presence of Christ in the contemporary world. Christ is not otherwise manifest in our world outside the praxis of a community that lives the way he taught and demonstrated and so mediates his presence to the world.