A Meditation for the Tuesday in Holy Week: Jesus and the coin. Mark 12.13-17

 

Mark 12:13-17

 

¹³ Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words. ¹⁴ They came to him and said, ‘Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay the poll-tax to Caesar or not? ¹⁵ Should we pay or shouldn’t we?’
But Jesus knew their hypocrisy. ‘Why are you trying to trap me?’ he asked. ‘Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.’ ¹⁶ They brought the coin, and he asked them, ‘Whose image is this? And whose inscription?’
‘Caesar’s,’ they replied.
¹⁷ Then Jesus said to them, ‘Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.’
And they were amazed at him.

All day long on this very busy Tuesday Jesus is engaged in confrontation. The priests, Pharisees, and Scribes and even the Sadducees have been bombarding Jesus with theological questions in both hypothetical situations and very real, politically charged situations. All day long Jesus has been confounding them, telling parables that point out their failings and cleverly evading their attempts to discredit him. And somewhere in the middle of the day a scribe, an educated man employed by the priests or Pharisees, asks a question and agrees with Jesus’ answer. There is no confrontation, no test, no effort to make Jesus look bad or to incriminate himself. This is the only such situation all day.

Jesus is challenged in the temple court before the crowd over paying taxes to Caesar. There is a fawning approach to Jesus Teacher, we know you are sincere and show deference to no one. This passage has reasonably been understood as a comment on the importance of keeping an appropriate relationship and distance between religious and civil authorities: we are to render to God and we are to render to Caesar. Some have argued that Jesus' response is a tacit acceptance that we are to be obedient to the state whatever it requires of us, but to see the passage this narrowly misses the wider context of attack, parry and counter attack, trap, escape and counter trap.

Should we pay taxes to Caesar was a volatile question that went to the heart of Israel's status as a subservient nation. Either answer would get Jesus into trouble: if he were to answer no, he could be charged with denying Roman authority - in short with sedition. If he were to answer yes, he risked discrediting himself with the crowd who resented Roman rule and taxation. Perhaps the plan was to separate Jesus from the crowd and undermine his support.

His response is clever and turns the situation back on his questioners: he sets a counter trap when he asks for a denarius which his interrogators produce. Whose head is this, and whose title? This strategy has led his questioners to disclose to the crowd that they have a coin with Caesar's image on it and in this moment they are discredited. Why? In Israel in the first century there were two types of coin: one type, because of the Jewish prohibition of graven images, had no human or animal images. The second type, including Roman coins, did and many Jews would not carry the second type in obedience to Jewish law. But these Pharisees did. The coin they produced had Caesar's image along with the idolatrous inscription heralding Caesar as divine son of God. They are exposed as part of the politics of collaboration and the crowd sees it. Their trap has been evaded and the counter trap sprung.

His response Give to the emperor the things that are the emperors is a non-answer to their original question. It simply means It's Caesar's coin - give it back to him. This is not an endorsement of paying taxes to the occupying force. The second part of his response, though, is both evocative and provocative: Give to God the things that are God's. It raises the question "What belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God?" Everything belongs to God and by implication, nothing belongs to Caesar.

A Meditation for the Monday of Holy Week: The fig tree and the Temple. Mark 11.12-24

 

 

Mark 11.12-24

¹²On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. ¹³Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. ¹⁴He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it. ¹⁵Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; ¹⁶and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. ¹⁷He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written,

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?
But you have made it a den of robbers.”

¹⁸And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. ¹⁹And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city. ²⁰In the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. ²¹Then Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” ²²Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. ²³Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. ²⁴So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
 

Mark begins this Monday with a hungry Jesus looking for fruit on a fig tree, which he then curses for not being in fruit. We are next taken into the Temple in Jerusalem where Jesus effectively closes the place down through his driving out of commercial activity before we return to the fig tree which has withered away to its root.

It is a mistake to see these as separate incidents: Mark's Gospel often contains pairs of incidents that are intended to be interpreted in the light of one another. Mark emphasises two seemingly contradictory elements in his account of the cursing of the fig tree: on the one hand it was Passover week which would have been late March or early April when the fig tree would not have been in fruit. It was not the season for figs. On the other hand Jesus was hungry and having failed to find fruit, cursed the tree to permanent barrenness. This is Mark's way of warning us to treat the event symbolically rather than literally.

If we take the incident literally we see a petulant Jesus abusing his divine power, but taken as a parable the fig tree's failure is a cypher for the temple. The framing fig tree warns us that the temple isn't being cleansed but symbolically destroyed and that, in both cases, the problem is a lack of fruit.

There are some Christians who assume Jesus was objecting to blood sacrifice although this is unlikely. From antiquity human beings knew two basic ways of creating and maintaining relationships with one another - the gift and the meal. How then did they create, maintain or restore good relationships with a divine being? What visible acts could they do to reach an invisible being? Again, they could give a gift or share a meal. In sacrifice as a gift the offerer took a valuable animal or other food and gave it to God by burning it on the altar and the smoke and smell rising upwards symbolized the transition of the gift from earth to heaven.

In sacrifice as a meal the animal was transferred to God by having its blood poured over the altar and the meat was then returned to the offerer as divine food for a sacred feast with God.

Neither is about suffering or substitution.

There may have been an issue with the ambiguity of the temple as both the House of God on earth and the institutional seat of submission to Rome. The temple's ambiguity was, however, far more ancient than any problem with Caiaphas's collusion with Pilate in particular or High Priestly collaboration with Rome in General: it goes back at least a further half a millennium to the time of the Prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 7 God tells Jeremiah to stand in front of the temple and confront those who enter to worship. Confront them about what? About their false sense of security. They seem to take it for granted that God's presence in the temple guarantees the security of Jerusalem and their own security too. Do you think, charges God through Jeremiah, that divine worship excuses you from divine justice and that all God wants is regular attendance at God's temple rather than an equitable distribution of God's justice? Has this house which is called by my name become a den of robbers in your sight? The people's everyday injustice makes them robbers and they think the temple is their safe house. The temple is not the place where robbery occurs but the place the robbers go for refuge. God does not just insist on justice and worship, but on justice over worship. I hate, I despise your festivals and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies......But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

The temple incident involved both an action by Jesus and a teaching that accompanied and explained it. First the action: Jesus began to drive out the buyers and sellers, he overturned the tables of the money changers, he overturned the seats of the dove sellers and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.

All of these activities were perfectly legitimate and absolutely necessary for the temple's normal functioning. What does it mean then that Jesus stopped the temple's perfectly legitimate sacrificial and fiscal activities? It means that Jesus has shut down the temple but in a symbolic rather than a literal shutdown.

At this point the Marcan frames of fig tree and temple coalesce. The tree was shut down for the lack of fruit Jesus looked for - and so also was the temple. In the case of the temple it is not cleansing but symbolic destruction, and the fig tree's fate emphasises that meaning.

Sadly in much modern Christian thought, den is ignored and robbery taken to mean the commerce going on in the outer courts of the temple. This is a symbolic fulfilment of God's threat in Jeremiah. There was nothing wrong with the combination of prayer, worship and sacrifice - they are commanded in the Torah. This is not the problem. God is a God of justice and righteousness and when prayer, worship and sacrifice substitute for justice, God rejects his temple - or, for us today, his church.

A Meditation for Palm Sunday. Mark 11.1-11

Meditations based on The Last Week by Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan

Mark 11.1-11

When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples ²and said to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. ³If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’” ⁴They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, ⁵some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” ⁶They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. ⁷Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. ⁸Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. ⁹Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,

“Hosanna!Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
¹⁰Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

¹¹Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30. It was the beginning of the week of Passover. One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives. His message was about the Kingdom of God and his followers came from the peasant class. On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate the Roman governor entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Pilate's procession proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus' Crucifixion.

Pilate's military procession was a demonstration of both Roman imperial power and Roman imperial theology. It was standard practice for Roman governors to be present in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival: not out of religious sensitivity but to be in the city in case there was trouble. There often was at Passover, a festival that celebrated the Jewish people's liberation from an earlier empire.

According to Roman imperial theology the Emperor was not simply ruler of Rome, but the Son of God. For Rome's Jewish subjects, Pilate's procession embodied not only a rival social order, but also a rival theology.

Jesus' procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate's procession embodied the power, glory and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus's procession embodied an alternative vision, the Kingdom of God. The confrontation between these two kingdoms continues through the last week of Jesus life.

Mark makes it starkly clear that the ruling Jewish elite worked via the tacit approval of the Roman authorities, the domination system, and were therefore collaborators. The local people were oppressed not just by the Romans and their taxes but by the puppet authorities - which included the Temple Authorities whose primary obligation to Rome was loyalty - and their taxes. Caiaphas must have been particularly skillful as he lasted in office for nearly twenty years.

This was the Jerusalem Jesus entered on Palm Sunday. His message was deeply critical of the temple and the role it had come to play in the domination system of empire and Jesus pronounces forgiveness apart from temple sacrifice. Jesus' message and activity put him in conflict with the temple authorities from the moment he arrived in Jerusalem.

As we consider Palm Sunday we need to be clear that the conflict which led to Jesus' crucifixion was not Jesus against Judaism. Jesus was part of Judaism not apart from it. His protest is about a domination system legitimated by God. Jesus' is a Jewish voice arguing about what loyalty to the God of Judaism meant.

Two processions entered Jerusalem that day. Which procession are we in? Which do we yearn to be in? This is the question of Palm Sunday and of the week that is about to unfold.

Fingers burnt: the Christian and Social Media

 

 

What did we do before Social Media? Surely it wasn’t that long ago when we met face to face or rang each other up – or at a push e-mailed one another.

I think I was late in buying in to social media or in recognising its potential in terms of mission and evangelism: I remember asking myself why I would need this while at the same time, given my record as a Luddite, recognising in some vague way that it would catch on.

I resisted Facebook for a long time but did embrace blogging: I felt I had a voice and, as a Christian, I had something to say and share. In some self-indulgent, misty way, I think I saw myself in the tradition of Nick Baines, the Blogging Bishop and Giles Fraser who tweets, uses Facebook and regularly writes for the Guardian. My style, as I saw it, was light, observational humour.

I soon found a network of people willing to discuss – and not all with the same Christian worldview - and I felt that my knowledge of the world-wide Anglican Communion and other denominations was greatly enhanced by regular contact with them.

Well, times have changed: Facebook, Facetime, Twitter, My-space, Pinterest, Instagram and a whole host of other sites I am not cool enough to know about have brought us closer together …. while having the potential to drive us further apart. While on the one hand I have a friend who tweets and Facebooks on the work of his church as a means of evangelism, on the other hand the world of Christian Social Media is not for the faint hearted and can be an incredibly combative environment where no prisoners are taken. On more than one occasion I have been told that my carefully thought through position on, say, the theology of stewardship and its link to climate change was an obvious outcome of my “sin darkened mind”. (This from a Texan). When we view social media from a position of our own discontent, whatever we find will be coloured with bitterness. There is a real danger at this point in finding one’s self locked into a dialogue of the deaf where no one listens because everyone is keen to score points and assert the supremacy of their own argument. “See how these Christians love one another” to summarise 1 Peter. It can all become very unedifying. There was a wonderful cartoon doing the rounds on Facebook a while back showing a man hunched over his laptop. “I’ll be up in a moment darling. I’m just telling someone they’re wrong on the INTERNET.”

In the media, hardly a week goes by without some public figure or other being exposed for intemperate language in a tweet, followed either by an apology and a resignation or by an attempt to brazen it out … and a resignation. Do you remember the priest who tweeted how boring the synod meeting he was attending was? Social Media seems to have become a largely rule-free zone where people can interact while accepting minimal personal responsibility for what they write. In the absence of guidelines for healthy and polite social media etiquette, are we left to decide our own boundaries for dealing with the many cyber opportunities out there?

What is the Christian to do? (And I have to declare an interest here because things that I have written have not always been taken in the spirit in which they were meant. I believe I’ve learnt from that but I also hope that others have too.)

Well, the churches have woken up to both the opportunities of Social Media - and its disadvantages - and diocesan policies now abound.

Like it or not, social media isn’t going away: all our young people take it for granted. When the Apostle Paul described what it meant to love others, he specifically mentioned that love does not boast. That post, that tweet, that picture isn’t just a picture, it isn’t just a tweet, it’s an opportunity to love others in a way that reflects Jesus – or it’s an opportunity to show them something quite different, something that looks nothing like Christ.

·       So what are the pros and cons of Social Media for the Christian?

·       How could Social Media best be used by the church?

Christian Priesthood: an open ended essay ....

Historical context: In ancient Israel, priests acted as mediators between God and his people. They ministered according to God's instruction and they offered sacrifices to God on behalf of the people. Once a year, the high priest would enter the holiest part of the temple and offer a sacrifice for the sins of all the people, including all the priests. Christians believe that Jesus' priesthood is the fulfilment of that prefigured in the Old Testament. Confusion arises from the fact that the word “priest” is not used in the New Testament in relation to the ministry as we have come to understand it: Apostles, Bishops and Presbyters are never referred to as priests. Jesus alone is the priest and the whole church is the priesthood. The priest does not so much stand between God and each of us as acts as a midwife to that relationship. In Jesus we see God and humanity coinhere. In other words God's divinity and our humanity permeate each other like a divine-human exchange.

In the New Testament there are two words from which the idea of priesthood seems to derive: ἱερεύς (hiereus) meaning "sacred one” and πρεσβύτερος (presbuteros) meaning “elder" or “one who leads”. The New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews draws a distinction between the Jewish priesthood and the high priesthood of Jesus, particularly as Jesus was of the House of Judah and not of the House of Levi; it teaches that the sacrificial atonement by Jesus has made the Jewish priesthood and its ritual sacrifices redundant. So, for Christians, Jesus himself is the only high priest, and Christians have no priesthood apart from participation in the priesthood of Jesus, the head of the Church.

This Epistle develops the idea of Jesus as supreme "high priest," who offered himself as a perfect sacrifice (Hebrews 7:23–28). Protestants believe that through Christ they have been given direct access to God, just like a priest; so, in opposition to the concept of a spiritual hierarchy within Christianity, the doctrine is called the priesthood of all believers. God is equally accessible to all disciples, and every Christian has authority to minister. It is in the First Epistle of Peter that the idea of church as priesthood is developed.

During the Reformation, while Luther did not use the exact phrase "priesthood of all believers," he talked of a general priesthood in the Christian world in his To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation in order to dismiss the medieval view that Christians in the present life were to be divided into two classes: "spiritual" and "secular".

That the pope or bishop ….. dresses differently from the laity ….. in no way makes a Christian or spiritual human being. In fact, we are all consecrated priests through Baptism, as St. Peter in 1 Peter 2:9 says, "You are a royal priesthood and a priestly kingdom," and Revelation 5:10, "Through your blood you have made us into priests and kings."

However, this belief in the priesthood of all believers does not mean that there is no order, authority or discipline. For example, The Lutheran Church maintains the biblical doctrine of "the preaching office" or the "office of the holy ministry" established by God in the Christian Church. So, alongside the priesthood of all the baptized, the pattern of ministerial priesthood from the old Catholic church was maintained, a pattern which shares in a unique way in the priesthood of Christ, and which differs essentially from the common priesthood of the faithful. The Augsburg Confession states:

Concerning church government it is taught that no one should publicly teach, preach, or administer the sacraments without a proper public call (Article 14).

It is hard not to see this understanding influence in some of the other churches of the Protestant Reformation, particularly the Anglican Church which considers all baptized members of the Church able to take part in the ministry of the Body of Christ. Anglican Christians traditionally believe that 1 Peter 2.9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light  gives responsibility to all believers for the preservation and spread of the Gospel and the Church, as distinct from the liturgical and sacramental roles of the ordained priesthood and episcopate. Anglicans, like the Lutherans, recognise the apostolic succession of bishops, the means by which the historical link between the present day and the early church is maintained.

The Catholic Church maintains to this day that the understanding of priesthood arising from the Reformation has been debased because it has lost its unique sacral dimension. They seem to interpret the Protestant understanding as taking away the model of priest as “set apart” and different from the rest of men. The tendency of Protestantism, it is claimed, has been to ground the identity of the priest ecclesiologically rather than christologically with an emphasis on functionalism with the priest is seen as a representative of the Church rather than as a representative of Christ. The process of laity empowerment in the church has been understood largely as a conferring of different ministries on them, tasks which previously were often carried out by the clergy. The result is a blurring of the identity of the priest both in the eyes of the clergy themselves as well as among lay people. These practices “give rise to a "functionalistic" conception of the ministry, which sees the ministry of "pastor" as a function and not as an ontological sacramental reality”. (Pope Benedict speaking as a Cardinal in 1998). This seems to bring us back to the start of this section and the issue of whether ἱερεύς  (sacred one) and πρεσβύτερος (elder or leader) are compatible or mutually exclusive.

The priesthood as I understand it:

In his book, Now is the Acceptable Time, Stephen Bayne writes talks about the tendency of individuals to talk about "their" ministries and points out, There is but one ministry, Christ's ministry. He is the only minister there is in the church. This idea is further developed by Kenneth Kirk, in his book, The Vision of God he writes, ... Jesus, though he spoke little about "seeing God" brought God more vividly before the spiritual eyes of his contemporaries than any other has ever done. He gave a vision of God where others could only speak of it. 

Priesthood is a defined role: we act within given parameters so it is not a licence to do our own thing but there is no exact template and if there was no one would fit it. One thing that does need flagging up, though, is that the call is Christ's but it is not a call to every role and aspect of priesthood but a clear inner calling to some of it. How one writes about priesthood is obviously influenced by personal perception and experience. Throughout my adult life I have had the good fortune to know priests who reflected in different ways the attractive image of Christ the Good Shepherd as they witnessed to the radicalism of the Gospel.

Priests are Christians before they are priests so whatever is special about Christians, or about the whole body of Christians, the church, will apply to priests too. We need to be clear from the start that the priest is not called in the first place to do something, but rather to be something: a person who reflects the person of Jesus and grows into his likeness in a distinctive way that builds up the body of the church. Writing in the introduction to Bonhoeffer’s No Rusty Swords, E. H. Robertson explains Bonhoeffer’s idea of a renewal of the mind from within which could only be accomplished as the mind of Christ was formed in the Christian. He [Bonhoeffer] took this beyond the “Be like Jesus” mantra and recognised that this renewal was a process and not a formula. This is not to be seen so much as a religious process, nor one that leads to the “religious person”, but as leading to “the person”.

One of the key things that my time with the Lutherans taught me was that the efficacy of the sacraments derives from their being God’s sacraments and therefore the worthiness (or otherwise) of the priest is an irrelevance. This is fully consistent with the doctrine of Justification through Faith by Grace Alone and I find this immensely reassuring as I don’t think I could contemplate the priesthood without understanding this fundamental of the fact that it isn’t all about me. No one is ever worthy of the priesthood: the Disciples themselves were a very mixed bag, with their own weaknesses and doubts. I remember Simon Peter's words to Jesus as he sensed him calling him to service: “Leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man” (Luke 5. 8). But Jesus called Peter all the same. What matters is not how I feel, but that Christ is calling me. It is not for me to ask, Why me?' (Although I do, constantly). God does the choosing. I am not chosen because I am better than others, or more worthy than them. Like God's people in the Old Testament, I am special because I have been chosen, not chosen because I am special. The priest is no less in need of salvation, forgiveness and healing than any other disciple. It is the Holy Spirit who unites the priest to Jesus Christ in a special way at his ordination, and the priest is totally dependent throughout his ministry on the continual indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The point is, as Michael Ramsey puts it in his book, The Christian Priest Today, Christ gives the gift of ordained priesthood and calls men [and women] to it. in the same way that he called the twelve and the wider group of followers.

A priest friend never tires of telling me that a priest is a man of God’s pardon, an instrument of forgiveness to others, but he is also a sinner, in need of forgiveness and renewal himself. Consequently, a priest needs to be a man of humility, realizing that in his weakness God calls him and that he responds, not on his own merits, but through the power of God working in him.

I would love to be able to say that humility is a strength of mine and I am sure that when he speaks in this way my friend is delivering a personal as much as a general comment. But I have experienced circumstances when I have felt drained of all my personal resources and strength and have felt “the dark night of my soul” and yet God has continued to use me and work through me.

I’m also not very good at renouncing myself. Yet every follower of Jesus is asked to “renounce himself and take up his cross” and follow the way of the Lord (Matthew 16. 24). There is a radical “leaving behind” involved in all discipleship (Matthew 8. 18-22; Luke 5. 11, 28). The Disciples themselves left everything to follow Jesus, and any call to ministry will always involve something of the same. I don’t know what that might mean in real terms and I often wonder what God could possibly ask of me in urban West Yorkshire that would represent that level of sacrifice but in my current mind-set I don’t see the priesthood as being about “giving up”, but rather about “taking on”.

Alter Christus and In Persona Christi:
  During the actual service of ordination the Bishop reminds those to be ordained that they are called to “grow up into his (Jesus’) likeness and sanctify the lives of all with whom they have to do." I have always thought of the priest as being Jesus’ understudy in this world but an understudy who is also a representative of fallen humanity. Christlike? Me? If only! And yet we are called to be “alter Christus” - another Christ. In a very real way we, as priests, mediate between man and God and between God and man in the same way that the High Priests of the Old Testament did and in the same way that Hebrews asserts Jesus “our Great High Priest” did. In 2010, Pope Benedict told the crowd in St. Peter’s Square that a priestly vocation is “not chosen by anyone for himself,” but a call to serve God in the Christian community. When he answers that call, the priest represents Jesus, who is never absent in the Church. A priest "never acts in the name of someone absent, but in the person of the Risen Christ.” Catholic teaching notwithstanding, that sounds like a universal model, what Ramsey calls the representative nature of ministry.

The priest is Christ’s ambassador, his authorized representative among his disciples. God entrusts him with his own continuing ministry. He puts his trust in the priest – the one he chooses, and makes him a steward, both of his people and of his presence. That is an awesome responsibility.

In their book, The Fire and The Clay: The Priest in Today’s Church, Peter Allan, George Guiver et al. note, The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve (Mark 10.45). This image is given a more concrete presentation by John in his description of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples on the eve of his passion. As applied to priesthood, the image suggests the quality of humble labour for other, in obedience to the Father, and to the point of sacrificing one’s own life. This must characterise the life of the priest. This is one of the realities of Christ’s life into which priests must seek to grow, and thus make it present for their people.


I remember when I was on my parish placement in Estonia, asking my supervisor about his views on the priesthood. It may have been a cultural or linguistic thing, but he talked almost exclusively in terms of “doing”  and it wasn’t until he began to talk in terms of “being” that much of what he had just said made more sense. It is what we are that matters. We do what we do because we are what we are: priests of Jesus Christ.

When I read the references in Hebrews to Jesus as High Priest it seems to me that the writer repeatedly stresses that Jesus was and is one with the people. It is as though he recognised that there would be for many readers a hesitation about this article of our faith, that Christ was "truly human." This quality, essential for any priest, is declared repeatedly, "in the days of his flesh" "Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears." At the point in his life which so vividly touches our own, qualifying him to be our priest, we have this time of fervent prayer. My challenge at this point lies in asking myself whether, in my humanity, I even begin to reflect this fervency of spirituality and, of course, I don’t much like the answer. I have to remind myself again that it is seeing Jesus as role model in my pilgrimage of faith which is what is required and any attempt at an analysis of levels of success is pointless.

Steven Croft in Ministry in Three Dimensions notes that intercession is the calling of every Christian. However, we need to assert that this aspect of prayer which is the giving of one’s self secretly on behalf of others is a vital discipline and tool in priestly ministry ….. it represents the foundation and core of any ministry which is concerned with seeing individual people reconciled to God, churches established and made strong and society transformed.

That said, I have to identify more with Barbara Brown Taylor who, in her writing, An Altar in the World, notes, I know a chapter on prayer belongs in this book, but I dread writing it. I have shelves full of prayer books and books on prayer. I have file draws full of notes from courses I have taught and taken on prayer. I have meditation benches I have used twice, prayer mantras I have intoned for as long as a week, notebooks with column after column of names of people in need of prayer (is writing them down enough?). I have a bowed psaltery - a Biblical stringed instrument mentioned in the book of Psalms - that dates from the year I thought I might be able to sing prayers easier than I could say them. I have invested a small fortune in icons, candles, monastic incense, coals and incense burners.

I am a failure at prayer. When people ask me about my prayer life ... my mind starts scrambling for ways to hide my problem. I start talking about other things I do that I hope will make me sound like a godly person. I ask the other person to tell me about her prayer life, hoping she will not notice that I have changed the subject. Perhaps this is what Ramsey means when he talks in a more upbeat assessment of “wasting time with God” and notes that such time is never actually wasted.

This leads into the idea of a priest needing to be a role model in his/her turn and the term often used is being of “good character”. I am slightly wary of this from my time with the Lutherans as I can see a variety of pitfalls looming, not the least being a sense of needing to be “good enough” and of living up to a model of discipleship that is defined by others and also because of its hints of a gospel of good works of which we should be cautious. I was once fortunate to meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu and was able to tell him something of my story. Something he said to me has stuck with me since, “God has chosen you for who you are. He chose you for your uniqueness. Do not let others change you.”  There have been times when I have felt constrained by other people wanting to change me and expressing disappointment that I was unable to fit their template. But Archbishop Tutu is right. God has called me for who I am and for my uniqueness and I should be more confident about that and less apologetic about not being someone else. In that context, every time I remember that a Diocesan Bishop once told Archbishop Welby that there was no place for him in the Church of England, I both smile and feel encouraged.

There are obvious things that might designate someone as not being of good character: problems with drugs/alcohol, unhealthy and inappropriate sexual behaviours and attitudes; racism, sexism, homophobia etc; uncontrollable temper; lack of empathy; a sense of innate superiority; failings with confidentiality and lack of discretion, wearing sandals with socks and so on. Beyond that it becomes more difficult and, I would suggest, more subjective. If I am looking at the qualities of a priest, while I might reject the promiscuous, the drug addled, the gossip and so on, might I not also be in danger of rejecting people simply because they aren’t like me and the model of discipleship I have adopted and which largely reflects the model of discipleship of those I associate with? After all, how could someone possibly have a calling from God and espouse that theology or that churchmanship? Might I not be wary of them because their life experience has been very different to mine; because they have a view of the faith which is too challenging and too prophetic for my sensibilities; because the methods they use in communicating the Gospel owe much more to contemporary methods of communication and technological know-how than I am entirely at ease with; because they are so unlike my understanding of priesthood that they seem rather threatening?  In that context I remain intrigued by Archbishop Welby’s experience as someone who has also failed to fit other people’s templates of priesthood.

All the churches stress the importance of “good character” in their Ordinands. So what does that mean? What constitutes “good character” and what constitutes subjective projection? This seems to me to be particularly relevant as we struggle with the nature of Holiness, especially as we are, none of, us fully formed or re-formed in the nature of Christ. However we are expected to acquire the essential priestly qualities which we see reflected in Christ's life as found in the Gospels: the priest's human personality should be a bridge for others to encounter Jesus. Jesus had a perfect human nature, and in Mark we read that as a man he did everything well (Mk 7:37). Of course many of his qualities will be underdeveloped in us and so they have to be worked at if we are to acquire that attractive Christ-like profile. But I fear that if we strive to be something we are not, and that striving for perfection leaves us all too aware of our limitations, that way lays depression and guilt. It is here that the words of Desmond Tutu always return to comfort me. “God has chosen you for who you are. He has chosen you for your uniqueness. Do not let others change you.”

This, of course, needs to be balanced by St. Paul's words to the Christians in Rome, I appeal to you therefore brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect. This means our whole being, a transformation which is effected by God, by divine grace.

So, despite our human limitations the priest has a duty to try to develop Christ-like qualities but not at the cost of sublimating his God-given personality. There is a fine balance here between striving for a standard we know we cannot attain and giving up because of the impossibility of attaining it.  Certainly as a priest I need to mature my talents for communication and social interaction so that God’s message through me comes across as credible and compelling despite society’s competing messages, but above all we need to live lives that will be authentic to the extent that they reflect Christ. We are, after all, in persona Christi (in the person of Christ). That however, begs the question of what authenticity looks like and to whose definition of that standard we are being held.

We see the characteristics of God revealed through Jesus’ disciples down the ages but primarily in Jesus as the incarnation, and those are the characteristics we must seek to emulate. It’s then down to us with the guidance of the Holy Spirit to work out which of the Fruit of The Spirit and which of the gifts bestowed upon the church are best reflected in our personalities and to play to those strengths - and to try to work on the rest as the Spirit gives us grace, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” (Philippians) Although we continue to be a work in progress, this requires a realistic sense of self and of self-worth.

Vocation and ministry spring from the nature of God and therefore shapes the church. Does the church play safe? Are we too worried about the “troublesome priest”, the prophetic voice speaking through and to the church? Sometimes it is that voice which speaks more to the unchurched than the voices that seem to reflect the status quo. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the world.” Jesus tells us in Mat 10.34. Personally, I don’t hear enough of that sort of talk in the church: I don’t think we have anything like enough Giles Frasers, Desmond Tutus, Martin Luther-Kings or John Shelby Spongs in the church today, but maybe, just maybe, with the arrival of a new Pope and a new Archbishop of Canterbury who clearly model and express a concern for the poor and marginalised, the tide may turn a bit more.

Prophetic ministry is, indeed, part of the priestly ministry but my own feeling is that we don’t hear it enough because in our selection of ordinands we are too reluctant to take risks: I can imagine a latter-day Giles Fraser “failing” a BAP chaired by a latter-day Martyn Jarrett. “Too outspoken. Too risky.”

Of its very nature the priestly vocation demands a deep relationship with Christ: 'I have called you friends' he told his disciples, who were, surely, his first priests, at the Last Supper (John 15.15). That relationship with Christ, however, is not something that comes automatically as a consequence of ordination. The Ordinand is already expected to have developed a mature relationship which can be developed further in priesthood, cultivated in prayer and study and allowed to mature progressively during the lifetime of the priest. That spirituality should also be an example for others to emulate. This gives central importance to the bonding between our spiritual life and the exercise of our ministry. When I look back at my own journey of faith and formation, it is clear to me and to those who have known me for a long time that I am not in the same place now as I was at the start of that pilgrimage. I would hope that those observers would interpret that as evidence of ongoing spiritual development.

The priest should be grounded in God. Dare I even whisper that? I don’t even come close – but I strive daily to be more the disciple God would have me be: my morning devotions include the petition, “Give me the words, the attitudes, the opinions and the skills” and I ask that I might reflect God to others; that they may see Him in me and that I may see Him in them. In those times spent reflecting on scripture I seek to find practical applications for myself’ I know the WWJD? Mantra may seem a bit trite to some but it is a good starting point. The idea of obedient discipleship is one that has been hammered home to me. The Lutheran Church is very suspicious about “good works” and the idea of striving to be a better disciple is a non-starter because it smacks of a gospel of justification through good works, so the motivation behind our behaviours, particularly those which seek to please God, really come under the microscope.

I was never entirely happy with this approach and I would always argue that while we don’t behave as we do to earn God’s favour, God still has expectations of us because of the requirement to be obedient disciples. “Go and do likewise ….”

For me, at the very heart of this lies the realisation that I am loved passionately and unconditionally by God and, when we know we are loved (and we see this in the world of our own human relationships) we respond: we want to respond in kind and to please and that includes, in our own inadequate ways trying to reflect and express that love to those who are around us.

That leads me to another key role of the priest which is to preach the word of God, to be an evangelist. In the present cultural environment where, as never before, people are bombarded with audio and visual information-overload, it is difficult to make our voices heard above all the distractions. Our preaching is also challenged by an increasing religious illiteracy and as a teacher of Religious Studies I often hear myself asking, “How do you not know these things?” Since we believe we are bearers of the message of salvation, following the example of St Paul we are asked to preach the good news of salvation in and out of season if we are to convince people that the attractions of this world do not in the long run provide redemption and in such a secularised society that will often seem completely counter-cultural.

What do we mean by evangelism? Is it the street preacher, frightening away the shoppers outside Harvey Nicholls with their message of God’s wrath and judgement? Is it the saccharine-style “Just come to Jesus” which requires no intellectual engagement? The you-have-to-tell-everyone-about-Jesus-because-they-are-dying-in-their-sin approach, which, having given its message, notes: “I’ve done my bit. You know the message now. My conscience is clear.” – the approach which condemns the softly, softly approach of winning the right to speak and showing empathy, genuineness and respect to people as friendship evangelism. “What happens if they drop dead tomorrow and you’ve not given them the message of Christ Crucified”? Does priestly evangelism encompass new technology such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter? Is it only what I say, or can it be how I model discipleship? As a priest which method of evangelism should I adopt? Up until now, I’ve just been letting the Holy Spirit do her thing in my life, but then I’ve no scalps to display.

However, we need to remember that while the priest may well be personally involved in mission, much of the time it will be about equipping others for the process of mission and evangelism. As priests we are members of a ministering church and the church is called to be a servant church in many ways. Within the Lutheran tradition diakonia - the diaconate - has most generally been interpreted in terms of social responsibility. 

I could go on. I’ve got into my stride but enough is as good as a feast. I’ll leave the last word to Stephen Platten from his book Vocation: Priests stand before God with humanity upon their hearts and, at the same time, before humanity with God etched on their hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

Transactional Analysis and the Priest’s role in fostering spiritual maturity.

One of the most profound things I have read recently was a comment that wasn’t about priesthood but which says a great deal about it, “We will see more clearly when we set the church the right way up, the laity first and the clergy as the people who service and enable them.” (Francis Dewar, “Called or Collared”)

Commenting on Isaiah 40.30/31, Young men may grow weary and faint, even in their prime they may stumble and fall; but those who look to the Lord will win new strength, they will grow wings like eagles; they will run and not be weary, they will march on and never grow faint Dewar notes, “I believe that the task of the parish priest at its most basic is to encourage and promote an ever deepening engagement [in dependence on God and in independent spiritual growth] among the members of the local church, and to promote their common life and worship in such a way as to enable this process and not prevent or hinder it.”

I am particularly interested in the preventing and hindering element of that statement.

The first church I ever went to nurtured me through a Christian commitment and the mother’s milk of spirituality and I was very happy there for about six years until I began to get a nagging sense that I needed to go deeper: I began to wonder whether I was stuck at a particular level of Christian understanding. Was this a church which peaked at an initial establishing of a living faith but did not develop its members further? Many years later, in another part of the country entirely, I was an occasional visitor at a church so similar in its churchmanship as to be uncanny and I had exactly the same feeling: two large evangelical congregations, seemingly flourishing with wonderfully effective youth organisations but a huge turnover amongst the adult congregation. Was it just me or were people not being encouraged into the next step of discipleship, a mature reflection of faith? Was the menu of religious instruction and discipleship too limited? Certainly in both congregations I noted a resistance amongst the leadership to tackle some of the big issues of the day and how the church or individual Christians should respond to them and an unwillingness amongst some of the congregation to be troubled by such conversations. Indeed, engaging some adult members of the congregation on issues that the church should be taking a lead on revealed quite a shocking lack of an understanding of the relationship of the church to the concerns of the world.

No more than two miles away from this second church is a much smaller congregation. It is quite unique in the diocese and has a reputation as the “last-chance saloon” of Christianity. The congregation here has a significant minority of people who have been damaged by the institutional church and theirs is a faith born out of suffering. I have noticed some of the adults who were at the neighbouring church turning up here: some, but not many. This congregation is characterised by spiritual maturity, a maturity within individuals but which translates to the character of the church. Here are people who are theologically literate; who show high levels of social engagement and emotional intelligence.

For different reasons a member of the clergy might count themselves fortunate indeed to end up in either of these churches, although both present significant challenges and the challenge for each church is the opposite side of the same coin from the other: how does the first church move its people beyond their current levels of spiritual maturity and how does the second church deal with those new to the faith?

It is probably worth noting that both these churches - and probably the bulk of those who fit the same model - are gathered churches and the local community are not significant players. It might be easy to see why.

At some point on the intervening continuum we probably find most other churches: the churches I am involved with would fall somewhere in the middle ground, and these “average” congregations usually contain people of widely varying degrees of spiritual maturity.

What does being a priest mean in these three models and what are the challenges? Well, according to Dewar it’s about getting the congregation into the right mindset so that issues of spiritual maturity become a three-way process: the individual, the priest and God.

Many years ago I was lucky to follow a practice-based counselling qualification. One of the models of counselling – and one that really made sense to me – was called Transactional Analysis and part of its rationale is to enable people to identify their default position in any given relationship, particularly where those relationships are problematic. There are three basic options, or ego states: Parent, Adult and Child and we can slip from one to another unconsciously depending on the natures of our varying relationships. Understanding our default positions and why we behave in those ways helps us to move more effectively into the ideal ego state, Adult.

One of the roles of the priest is surely to foster in his congregation is a condition of extra-dependency: this is where individuals depend on a person or object outside of themselves for affirmation, confirmation, protection and sustenance (as in our childish phase - whether we are an actual child or in Child-ego role). The priest needs to encourage that extra-dependence to be on God, not on the priest, the prayerbook or the church building - the process of spiritual maturity. But there is also an intra-dependency where the dependence is within oneself as a responsible, self-actuating adult. These need to go together: each feeding off the other and moving deeper and the priest is working with these dependencies, encouraging others to grow to a mature and adult sense of self-awareness and a mature and adult relationship with God.

It seems to me that in those churches where people have reached a level of maturity and have plateaued, members of the congregation might be held in a dependency relationship with the clergy: the clergy take on the role of Parent, either more nurturing or more criticising but essentially seeing themselves in a position of managing or controlling those around them: the sacerdotal view of priesthood with its emphasis on bestowing personal spiritual power on the priest may well contribute to this. Unless the priest is aware of this and if the congregation collude with the priest as the fount of wisdom, knowledge and the initiator and driver of activities, that congregation – made up of its individuals – won’t flourish into spiritual maturity. They can fall into the Child role, characterised by a lack of independence and a willingness to be told what to do, how to think, what values to espouse, even an expectation of being directed.

One could also argue that in churches characterised by a greater spiritual maturity, such congregations – made up of their individuals – may be taking the Parent role following the theology of the priesthood of all believers in a very literal sense. An unwary priest here might find themselves on the back foot and fall into the role of compliant Child when faced with a situation where they feel surplus to requirements and follow the line of least resistance or, worse, the rebellious Child, petulant and easily offended and upset, trying to get their own way against a seemingly immovable force, the synergy of the congregation.

One of the key principles of Transactional Analysis is the notion of O.K.ness: (I’m O.K. and you’re O.K.) Where does that leave a member of a congregation if he/she picks up the message overt or covert from the vicar that they are not O.K. or for the vicar to pick up the same message from members of the congregation?

The Parent and Child states have lots of feelings, usually influenced by the past. Those feelings may not be appropriate or useful in the present. Some people describe the Adult state as almost without feelings. It is cool and objective, a reflection of the Logos, part of the divine Word revealing the truth. It decides whether the feelings and reactions of the Parent or Child states are useful in the present. Others suggest the Adult does indeed have feelings as useful parts of their abilities, the appropriate and useful feelings of the here and now.

There is a misunderstanding about the Adult state which sees it as the ideal which rejects the other two. That is not strictly true: it needs to be informed by the Child and the Parent but the Adult state is the best state to decide which state to be in. When should you leave Compliant Child to tell a home truth? Or leave Nurturing Parent to let someone stand on his or her own feet? Perhaps your parents told you not to talk to strangers, but now you're a vicar - perhaps the rule does not apply. The Free Child's intuition suggests possibilities but the Adult state tests that out. The Critical Parent may reject possibilities but the Adult state tests that out.

In terms of ministry, a conscious Adult persona seems to me to be the ideal for helping others to mature spiritually because it sees the danger in controlling (Critical Parent) and in the line of least resistance (Compliant Child): it recognises the dangers and pitfalls of responses based on both Child and Parent and because it is consciously objective it will choose a neutral approach of language and tone.

Let’s go back to where we started with Dewar, “I believe that the task of the parish priest at its most basic is to encourage and promote an ever deepening engagement [in dependence on God and in independent spiritual growth] among the members of the local church, and to promote their common life and worship in such a way as to enable this process and not prevent or hinder it.”

“We will see more clearly when we set the church the right way up, the laity first and the clergy as the people who service and enable them.”

However, in most congregations the number of the laity actively seeking that deepening level of spiritual awareness is probably quite small: what proportion of those who regularly attend Sunday worship will also attend Lent or other study or Bible study groups or house groups, parish away-days and the like? The development of spiritual maturity can not start and end with the Sunday sermon. So how does the priest lead the horse to water and make it drink?

Too be continued ……..

Hearing God's call

During this period in Lent, another thing that I have been encouraged to think about is the call of God to ministry and how I experienced this. I’ve had conversations with a number of friends who are in ministry and have started to read around the subject.

A number of things arose which I have found helpful and are worth looking at before I consider particular models - and, indeed - my own model of calling.

·       That the call must come from God is perhaps a given that we shouldn’t even need to articulate.

·       God has a passion for social justice and fairness.

·       God calls people to an endlessly varied and unique ministry, but is always related to the freeing, liberating or empowering of others.

·       We are all unworthy of the call.

·       A total dependence on God is required or we try to act in our own strength.

·       We all tend to feel totally inadequate.

·       What we are called to is a privilege.

·       Most people want to resist the call.

·       Whatever we are called to is God’s mission not our own project.

A few people, but a very few, talk about an epiphany like that of St. Paul: an instant undeniable revelatory experience of utter certainty. Paul’s was also a calling to a very specific ministry of evangelism and teaching and some people talk confidently about their certainty that God’s call was to a particular ministry.

Another talked of her call as being like that of Hosea. Hosea’s personal life was a mess and so, according to my friend was hers. She couldn’t believe God had called her initially. “Me? Really? You must be joking!”

A number of people felt like Samuel or Jeremiah in that they first heard the inklings of a call when they were too young and inexperienced and they talk about this in a way which suggests that a seed was planted for the future.

One person, who is a convert to Christianity, uses the example of Cyrus, a King from another nation and faith system. He finds those perspectives enhance his Christian faith but notes that others still see him as an outsider.

A couple of people with a strong sense of Social justice talk about the prophets as their models, particularly Nehemiah and Ezra and note that both were instrumental in changing their religious landscape by introducing religious reforms: future Bishops in the making?

For me, there’s a bit of the Jeremiah in the sense of initially feeling the call as a nudge of the not-quite-yet variety because like Jeremiah I didn’t feel ready but unlike Jeremiah, I didn’t answer that first nudge. There’s also a sense in which the call of the prophets to action resonates with me, but in the end I think I’m a Jonah. When push comes to shove, running away and being busy doing other things seemed a good strategy.

How about you?