The Divine Universe

Life is a journey; some would say an uphill journey, and everyone, including atheists, looks for guides or leaders along the way. Most people choose several mentors at different stages of their journey.

In his gospel, Luke tells us about Christian discipleship led by Jesus. Describing his final journey to Jerusalem he tells of several encounters that illustrate this theme. It was a dangerous mission, fatal as it turned out, and Christians are encouraged to see their discipleship as an adventure. There can be dangers but, in this country at least, church membership is a fairly safe adventure.

Luke’s first story is about dealing with conflict. The people of a Samaritan village were hostile because Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem for Passover. There was an ancient religious dispute between Jews and Samaritans going back to the time of Solomon.

Jesus’ disciples were more offended and angry than Jesus was himself. James and John wanted divine retribution – fire from heaven. Today we don’t call for divine intervention from on high; we rain fire and destruction from high-altitude bombers and helicopter gunships. President Bush and his band of right-wing, born-again Christians even invoke God’s support for their war in Iraq, making it a sort of Christian jihad.

We all know what extremist Moslem jihad looks like: beheading women who don’t wear headscarves, shooting little girls who dare to go to school, cutting off thieves’ hands and, of course, suicide bombers, but we are less willing to recognise extremist Christianity. Extremist Christianity or ‘power Christianity’ led to the Crusades and the Inquisition, but there are still power Christians around today, spreading fear, hatred, prejudice and violence. The total sum of innocent deaths, orphaned children and wrecked lives they have caused in Iraq may never be known.

Traditionally we refer to the Church militant. Jesus was militant. He fought against hypocrisy, bigotry and prejudice; against political and religious corruption; against all the perverted thinking and the politics of power that use religion and God’s good gifts for self-serving ends.

But Jesus was a radical pacifist. In his final confrontation with his enemies he wouldn’t allow his disciples even to use what we might see as reasonable force in his defence. He told Peter to put away his sword. On this occasion he rebuked James and John for their misguided zeal. But trying to find a non-violent way to deal with people who hate us, make impossible demands or attack us is sometimes just too difficult, so we resort to violence.

In Luke’s next episode, Jesus said to a would-be disciple, “Birds build nests and foxes dig holes, but the Son of Man (the Messiah) has nowhere to lay his head.” Humans have, in fact, built nests for themselves ever since they left the caves, and we’ve created a wealth of art and technology in the process. Jesus left home to become a vagrant. Vagrants have always been and still are an unwanted embarrassment in society. Jesus chose this, the lowest way of life possible. It was another example of his militant challenge to mainstream social values.

We might also detect a subtler message in Jesus’ words. Suppose he was using “son of man” as a general term for humankind rather than as a messianic title. In sensitive people there is always a deep, underlying feeling of homelessness: a feeling of being exiles in an alien land. It is not only that we crave a more luxurious lifestyle or greater wealth and fame. They are blind alleys anyway. Our feeling of alienation is really a yearning for the Kingdom, a longing to be at home with God.

To be honest, I don’t always find God easy to live with, and I know God cannot find me easy either, yet I also know I can’t live without him and I want to know and understand him better. Then, I believe, life will be more complete and happy. I will be more fully at home with God. But it takes patience and perseverance.

In the next encounter, Jesus invited someone to follow him, but the man wanted to stay home till his father died. Jesus was very blunt: “Let the dead bury their dead.” He was not asking this man to do anything he hadn’t done himself. I don’t know how his mother and his brothers and sisters (if he had them) felt about him leaving the home and family business. His father was dead and he was the eldest. Conservative tradition holds he was the only son. Abdicating such a responsibility was a breach of custom, of family values. But Jesus was saying that if we’re seriously looking for fullness of life, not even family must be allowed to stand in our way. We need to check for unnecessary inhibitions and things that tie us down, social, material or even domestic.

Luke’s third story is about another would-be disciple, but he too has family to think of. Jesus told him that a ploughman must keep his eye on the ground ahead, not look back. In talking with his family, the man might lose his direction. Conflicting desires and responsibilities, and family pressure especially, can be confusing. If you decide to follow Christ in a new way, let go of the past.

In these short anecdotes, Luke makes me think about the decision my parents made for me in infancy and my subsequent Christian discipleship. Luke’s stories are not primarily about specific actions; they’re primarily about what kind of person I will become if I follow Jesus. James said that faith without works is dead, but actions depend on one’s basic attitude to life, one’s beliefs and values.

The stories reveal Jesus’ personal character. He was courageous, adventurous, militant, but a radically non-violent person. We all prefer non-violent ways; we are horrified by war and terrorism, but we resort to force and even war in emergencies.

Jesus was also a totally liberated person. He broke free of convention, even family obligations, and he completely contradicted popular expectations of Messiah. He lived life completely. He was more alive than we are. We are often tied down by convention, by the expectations of others, by social or religious duties. We are still partly in the womb. Our lives are still enclosed by structures of security and the mores of respectability and convention. If we checked our beliefs and attitudes and maybe took some risks to follow Jesus more closely, we might become more alive and free. This is what Luke’s stories all seem to be saying

From the atom to the galaxy, and everything in between, there is evidence of design. From Newton till the twentieth century - the era of ‘modern’ science - scientists saw the universe as a complex machine. Since Einstein and Max Planck, however, relativity and quantum theory have led to a radical revision of scientists’ perception of nature and the universe - what might be called ‘post-modern’ science. Early last century Julian Huxley said, “Nature is not only weird, it is weirder than we can possibly imagine.” I don’t think he would revise that statement today.

Today, scientists are more and more seeing the universe as a living organism rather than a machine.
Since Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, cosmologists have realized that it is also evolving over time: becoming ever more complex. Quantum theory holds that this complexification is a process of infinitely small, random events. Physicists deal, not with simple cause and effect, but probabilities. The probability of the Universe developing as it has is incalculably small. It depends on extremely finely tuned initial ratios between the strength of energy fields and certain other physical factors.

After fourteen billion years of such random events, bringing increased order out of chaos, thinking organisms have emerged and with them what we call intelligence. But what is intelligence? Psychologists measure intelligence experimentally as an individual’s ability to make deductions from given data, but it is more than the use of formal logic. It includes memory and intuition; it overlaps with the direct perception of patterns, of beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord.

Most people associate mind and intelligence only with humans and tend to regard humankind as separate from the rest of nature, a different order of being. But there are many people who do not think this way. Australian and American aborigines and mystics like Saint Francis and Teilhard de Chardin, for example, see the whole of nature as an interrelated community. Today scientists recognise that humankind is an integral part of the universe. We are of the earth, a product of cosmic process. We are not outside observers, alien invaders or an added extra; our species is a transient phenomenon in a cosmic evolutionary process.

Many scientists recognise mind, not simply as electric currents in the brain cells and nervous system, but as something that exists in its own right. Even plants seem clever and ingenious in their tricks of survival and the promotion of their genes. There is no detectable trace of intelligence in a rock, but no one has identified a definable cut-off point. Earth, and humankind in particular, may be the cosmic centre of gravity for mind, or may not be. There may be other concentrations in other places in the universe in similar or possibly in very different life forms. It is not unreasonable to suppose mind is distributed throughout the universe, albeit very unequally, the way matter is. Some scientists have coined the term ‘psi field’, as in psychology and psyche: an energy that there is at present no means of observing experimentally or measuring quantitatively.

It seems mind is a cosmic phenomenon that we cannot locate precisely. It is everywhere. Some have suggested that a cosmic “mind” directs the process of complexification. The uncertainty and randomness observed by particle physicists does not eliminate the notion of direction and even purpose; it only indicates nature’s infinite flexibility and potential. Anything can happen, though with varying degrees of probability. The probability of thinking beings made of matter emerging through random events out of the total chaos of the primordial universe is incalculably small, and it took fourteen billion years; but it has happened.

Religious believers generally embrace the notion of transcendent intelligence, though wisdom is a more popular word. Monotheists believe in an infinitely wise God. Hindus believe in a transcendent power that is infinitely wise and just, whose judgments are experienced as karma. They believe that the individual evolves through a succession of incarnations that advance forward or decline backward according to the disposition and conduct of the individual.

This introduces the notion of something that overrules the mind. We call it the will. The will is not a rational faculty that deals with data; it is something that generates motion, action. All action is either creative or destructive. Some people speak of positive and negative energy. It seems that the energy of the universe is, on balance, positive and creative. The cosmic mind seems set upon self-creation, not destruction and, although increasing entropy is an inherent tendency in nature, the opposite, increasing order, has been the overriding phenomenon since the beginning.

According to Darwin, biological evolution results from adaptation to environmental change. Those members of a species in which random changes in genetic code fit them better for their environment thrive and reproduce more than less lucky ones. But recent research in France has revealed a new, mysterious evolutionary driver that is not related to environmental change. The formation of the bones of the skull is largely dependent on the changing shape of one particular bone near the spine. This coincides with changes in the form, posture and behaviour of the higher primates and, ultimately, Homo sapiens. The adoption of the upright position, for example, has been found to be unrelated to the environmental changes in Africa that were previously thought to be the cause. It occurred simultaneously world wide. It is also hard to prove that the development of larger brains, and with them enhanced consciousness and intelligence, bestowed any real advantage.

The process of advancing levels of consciousness and mental power cannot be attributed simply to environmental advantage. It is easier in fact to link moral sense with adaptation to the environment than pure intelligence. The ‘altruism’ and social responsibility of ants, for example, has been a major factor in their success. There is something else driving evolution.

It is as though heightening of consciousness is something the universe values and promotes for its own sake. It could be argued that mystics are the highest development of evolution. Intelligence, or thinking power, is only a stage of development towards the direct perception, deep insight and intuition of the mystic. The universe manifests its greatest sense of its own reality in humankind, but this is an ongoing process. It is not over yet. We are not Mother Earth’s last word.

Ultimate total self-awareness and wisdom belong to God, embodied in a yet-to-be-perfected universe. The universe is in the process of becoming what it truly is – the embodiment of the mind of God: the Cosmic Christ, the Logos.

A sermon for Trinity Sunday.

During the last six months we have celebrated the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Today is Trinity Sunday, so fasten your mental safety belts and ensure your seats are in the upright position because we’re scheduled to take off into the dizzy realms of abstract theology. The Trinity image of two men and a bird is, of course, metaphorical; the doctrine of the Trinity is an intellectual abstraction.

We like to see things in threes. In many mystic traditions three is an especially holy number. If asked for a definition including absolutely everything we would perhaps say, first, the natural or material world, second, the supernatural or spiritual world, and third, God. Many people believe in that trio without recognising its unity. They see it as a three things, not a trinity. We seem scared of the idea that there is a single unity of total being. Splitting something up into its component parts makes it easier to understand, whether we are talking about motorbikes or the universe, or God; but if you don’t put it together again it won’t work.

Often we just split things in two. It’s called dualism. God and creation is the ultimate dualism. Creation is a thing God put together. God is an entity out there, beyond the sky. That is our favourite dualism, but the doctrine of the Holy Trinity abolishes that.

The Holy Trinity was not invented to take God apart for analysis; it was invented to unite God with everything, the ultimate unity, the union of God and creation. For us Christians the key to this ultimate atonement (at-one-ment) is Jesus Christ

St Paul realised this. He wrote to the Colossians that everything is in Christ: not just Jesus, not even just the Church, but everything that exists. St John later said the same thing but differently, calling Christ the Logos, the Word, the utterance of God. “All things came into being through him,” he wrote, “And without him not one thing came into being.” And he, the Word, the utterance of God, is not something God made or did; it is God. The Word is the manifestation of God’s mind.

At this point we should note that ‘things’ did not just come into being, full stop. Every thing has a limited lifespan, including human beings. So creation, the “all things” that Paul and John refer to is not an inert collection of things; it is a process, an ongoing event, with things appearing and disappearing all the time. That is why we distinguish God from things. God is not a thing, an entity or even a person. God is eternal, not temporary. We distinguish between God and things, but we must not separate them. Every single thing is in God. There is no ‘outside’ of God; God doesn’t have a ‘skin’.

The Creed says we believe in one God, the Father, yet both the Son and the Spirit are equally God: not a trio but a trinity. People speak of the ‘incarnation’, the embodiment of God. Although some people still think that the incarnation just means Jesus, Paul soon realised it didn’t end there.

Jesus said, “In as much as you do it to the least, you do it to me.” He was referring primarily to other people, but we are now realising that we cannot separate humankind from everything else. We are part of a global organism, the biosphere, which spreads over the whole planet, and this emerged from the geosphere, the earth and sea. We have begun to speak of respect for the environment, both biological and geological, and to realise that what we do to our environment we do to ourselves and to God. Today Homo sapiens and many other species are at risk because we have failed to see our organic unity with the world around us. If we wound it, we wound ourselves. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity has very practical implications and important links to science.

Jesus also said, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” One of the most learned theologians of our time, Pope Benedict XVI, observes in a book just published that the vine is not just something God made or planted: if Jesus is God, then the vine is God. God dwells in us and in everything. The universe is not something God built in his workshop; God gives birth to it in a continuous act of procreation, it is his offspring, one flesh.

But we can’t stop there. The materialization of God, the cosmic Christ, is not all that God is. Humankind seems from the dawn of our higher consciousness to have been aware that the world is not only what the senses can perceive, the world of matter. Theoretical physicists are now talking about fields of energy beyond gravity, electromagnetism and two atomic ones, the four they’ve studied. And there may be many more than four dimensions. They recognise that reality extends beyond the observable and measurable, and they are exploring that discovery.

We know God through his embodied presence, but we also sense that there is a source of knowledge beyond the reach of our senses. Theologian, John Taylor, has called it the “Go-Between God”, the communicator of love, knowledge and understanding. Jews and Christians have called it the Holy Spirit, the spirit of love, the energy of creation. But the Holy Spirit is not all that God is any more than Christ is. It is the one Jesus called “Father” who is the whole of God. The 12th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said it beautifully: “God is everything, but everything is not God.”

If you feel a bit confused, wrestling with these abstractions of systematic theology, don’t switch off. I am deliberately trying to melt your ideas about God. I don’t want to leave you confused, but with a deep sense of awe, living within an ineffable mystery that cannot be analyzed or defined because we are inside it, part of it.

Though God cannot be analyzed or defined, we have seen that he can be partially known through his embodied presence in everything around us. But he seems to look so un-godlike – so ordinary, sometimes even scandalous. But if you want to know how God can be ordinary and scandalous, read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth and death.

And God can also be known by simply spending time in the shade of the cloud of unknowing, waiting for him to take the initiative and open the conversation. And you may need to be very patient.

The publication by leading biologist, Richard Dawkins, of new book vilifying religion and belief in God in a rather ignorant and arrogant way prompts me to depart from my usual theme about heaven.

From his previous writings I cannot doubt Dawkins’ intelligence and wit, but he could make a more useful contribution to the study of religion if he approached the subject scientifically rather than ideologically. Instead of engaging in polemic against the evils of what one might call ‘religion abuse’ he might ask the basic scientific question made famous by Professor Julius Sumner Miller: “Why is it so?”

Religion is one of the seminal elements in human cultural development. Its origins go back seemingly almost to the beginning of what we think of as the distinctive feature of human consciousness – the awareness of self in relation to other persons and powers. Why is it so? Why is there religion?

You don’t have to be religious in any formal sense to address this question. Non-religious psychologists, anthropologists as well as religious ones who study human nature have offered valuable observations and insights that are of value to any open minded person interested in what some call the Big Questions. But Dawkins’ treatment of religion is equivalent to the creationist’s treatment of evolution – deliberate selection of data in pursuit of a foregone conclusion. Anything less scientific than his recent diatribe against religion, THE GOD DELUSION, would be hard to imagine. His knowledge of religion is patchy, to say the least, and his ignorance of theology appears to be encyclopaedic.

Religion per se is neither good nor bad. Like evolution, it is an undeniable phenomenon and a fact of life. As with evolution, theories about it are still developing. Religion has itself evolved over, possibly, hundreds of thousands of years, depending on how you define it, so theories about religion and theories about evolution are related. Religion has sometimes been creative, enlightening and ennobling, and sometimes destructive and brutalising, darkening the mind and corrupting intention. It can enrich and empower people or it can impoverish and enslave them.

Sense of the sacred and the religions arising from it are together one of the mysteries of human life, like love or the appreciation of beauty. But instead of asking bold questions and searching, by intuition, experiment and reason, for a deeper understanding, like a proper scientist, Dawkins selects his data in a very biased and unprofessional way and arrives prematurely at a flawed conclusion.

I share his natural horror at the grotesque abuses and inane silliness of some religion, but Dawkins convinces himself that that is all religion is: an abuse and debasement of human nature. For him all religious people are murderous fanatics, predatory exploiters, deluded fools or victims of fraud.

Religion begins with awareness and naming of mysterious powers within nature and ends up in the search for ultimate reality. It moves on to deism and theism when the Ultimate is personified and often anthropomorphised. Religion offers a relationship with a personal Divinity, transcendent to and, in the major traditions of both East and West, also immanent in all things.

Closely associated with religion, but often in conflict with it, are seers, prophets and mystics. Not all mystics have a specific religion and quite a number today are scientists. The numinous experience of being one with everything is not confined to those seeking a personified god. And scientists are good at intuitively sensing a relationship, a unity between things hitherto thought to be quite separate. The mystical experience of union with everything is not outside the scientific realm. The search for words or symbols to describe ultimate reality is as much the work of scientists as it is of theologians, though the language is different. Layer by layer they probe more and more deeply into the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time, towards the goal of a unified understanding of everything – a “grand unified theory”. Science and theology overlap. The late Stephen J Gould, a much more open-minded atheist than Dawkins, referred to it as “interdigitation”.

Scientists also create images, though not personal ones. The image of Rutherford’s atom and the DNA molecule are familiar to everyone; high school students create computer images of black holes. Science, like religion, seeks to give expression to the inexpressible; it seeks, through visual art, to give mysteries visible forms. Where an object emits light or measurable radiation, it can be observed, but such visibility fades as one goes more deeply into matter or out into space-time. Science needs myths and images. The Big Bang story is one of the richest legends of our day.

Some theologians are not content to study particular theories about God. Like theoretical physicists, they seek a unified understanding of reality. They are unsatisfied with the ancient dualism of God/creation. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, with its recognition of the incarnation or embodiment of God in the cosmic Christ, the sum total of all things, is a powerful tool in the search for a unified theory of Total Reality. God is seen but only through divine embodiment or ‘incarnation’ in material objects and the forces of physical nature.

Religion has inspired a tremendous wealth of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, dance, drama and every form of art. In fact it is probably true to say that the majority of art is connected with religion and mystical experience. Science has also inspired works of art, both in the laboratory and beyond, but not on the same scale. It is impossible to respond emotionally to aesthetic beauty without recognising that there is more to existence than solids, liquids and gases. We cannot do without the word spirit, however unsure we may be of its meaning; and God is one logical conclusion of whatever that meaning is. In fact we cannot even use the word inspired without hinting at a so far unidentified field of energy or source of knowledge. The recognition that spirit and matter are part of one total reality leads logically (though not imperatively) to religion of one kind or another. It is also leading many scientists to set their sights beyond the artificial walls that conventionally surround their own field of study.

But not Dawkins. Sadly, Dawkins remains imprisoned by nineteenth century materialism – what Paul Davies calls “nothing butism”. He obviously has quite a passionate interest in religion and theories about God, but he settles for an ideology every bit as blinkered and irrational as the creationist who stubbornly refuses to recognise the fact of evolution or respect the validity and nobility of real science.

St Francis is the most popular saint in Protestant Christendom. Even agnostics and atheists have a soft spot for him for his unspoken challenge to the corrupt and worldly 12th century Church. Pet-lovers adore him - a kind of patron saint of birdbaths. But the Francis of prayer cards, stained glass windows and statuettes ring slightly untrue to me – that long, clerical habit (the habit preserved in Assisi is a short worker’s tunic), the ever-present birds and often a rather soppy expression.

The Francis I read about in the early hagiographies however also makes me uncomfortable. Extravagant legends of his sanctity evoke a slightly embarrassed scepticism. Challenges in his written exhortations to a literal interpretation of the Gospels make me feel ashamed and inadequate. I am neither holy enough nor devout enough to really identify with all this, though I often wish I could.

However, G K Chesterton’s popular biography of the mid-20th century gave me a clue to something I can identify with. He suggested that Francis was one of the great nature mystics. Christian mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckart and Teilhard de Chardin have not enjoyed a warm welcome by the Church authorities, but mysticism has had a revival in recent years. New-agers, post-modern philosophers, theologians and quantum physicists have been rediscovering what Western culture lost during the Enlightenment, the modernist scientific era. I refer to our intrinsic unity with the living organism we call our universe.

During the modernist era we regarded humankind and the rest of physical nature as quite separate. We imagined that we observed nature objectively. Nature was perceived as an intricate and wonderful machine, designed and created by a God who still manipulated the controls occasionally from a distance. We are still in the eventide of that era. Dinosaurs like Richard Dawkins and Bishop Spong still wave the banner of modernism.

St Francis anticipated the Renaissance; he also anticipated post-modernism. The resergence of mysticism is linked to the post-modern era. I suppose you’ve heard about the mystic ordering a hamburger: “Make me one with everything.” Francis obviously felt this union deeply, though he never expressed it in philosophical, theological or scientific terms. He saw God, worshipped and glorified in everything around him, and felt it all as an extended family. Everything was God’s offspring and his sibling. Only in self-centred and self-destructive humans, including himself, did Francis see cause for sorrow.

This unity is clearly expressed in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. God is not simply a spirit; God is also embodied, incarnate in physical nature – the cosmic Christ. The Father and Son are not two gods, but one God: one single, dynamic total reality, transcendent and immanent. Ultimately, God is the only reality.

During the industrial revolution, people almost totally lost sight of our relationship with the rest of nature. The result of that now threatens human survival and many other species as well. Nature is now delivering a prophetic ultimatum and the first to hear this cry of warning has not been theologians but scientists; not devout religionists, but the sceptical, inquisitive and rigorous interrogators of nature.

The resurgence of mysticism in the West, some of it in the church, may have come at a providential time. Those with a mystical and contemplative bent were probably the first to appreciate what the scientists were saying. There are mystics in the science community too. Quantum physics has made a strong appeal among many who are interested in what they call “spirituality”. Quantum physicists recognise clearly the unity of everything in a mysterious, dynamic dance of energy. Each of us is not only related to everyone else; we are remotely related in cosmic energy fields to everything, even the most distant galaxies.

I don’t know how Francis would have reacted to industrialisation. I suspect he would not have been comfortable with it. It would not be the affluence of the industrial world that he would weep about, but the mindless and destructive exploitation of nature.

Ordinary people have recently woken up to the crisis, though we still need to discover within ourselves our unity with everything and a love that only the Holy Spirit can inspire. We still love our cars, our interstate and overseas flights, our coal-powered heating and cooling, and all our gadgets, and politicians are afraid to act. But scientists have been to first to see light beyond the tunnel. We have the technology to meet our needs with renewable energy sources. At first the cost will be considerable, but many new jobs will emerge, and later on the savings will be enormous.

Long-term survival, the whole process of life and evolution, involves dying as well as living, and we are all dying even while we think we live. “Unless a seed enters the ground and dies, it remains a bare grain,” said Jesus. Francis loved life as passionately as we do, but he welcomed “Sister Death”. For him, living and dying were one glorious process.
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The post-modern philosopher, Don Cupitt, once nearly died of heart failure several times within a few days. In a book written later I came upon these words.

“We seem to have forgotten how to die. . . . We live by dying, unattached, pouring ourselves into the flux of life in such a way that death, when it comes, is not a threat but a consummation.”

He could well have had St Francis in mind. In this age of individualism, such thoughts of total absorption into the flux of life totally contradict the spirit of our time. Francis was one of the outstanding and very eccentric individuals of European history, but he rejected fame and fortune, pouring himself, destitute, into the flux of life. The heavenly fool saw Christ as his model. The self-giving life of Christ, glorifying the Father and glorified in him, is manifest in all the world around us, living and dying. This was Francis’ wonderful discovery.

What we do about climate change is still being debated. Scientists have done all the real work so far. Politicians have been the most timid and tardy. We all fear and resist change. Public awareness is awakening, but I believe the real problem is more spiritual than technical or political. Francis and the great nature mystics of every age, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Australian and American aborigines and even non-religious mystics can teach us. We must share something of their vision of mystery and beauty. Saving grace first, then saving technology and political action will follow.

It is Good Friday and I am reflecting on the death of Jesus. Jesus died through an act of extreme brutality and cruelty, and one is horrified to realize that it was a routine procedure throughout the Roman Empire. It happened to thousands of people. Jesus was just one of a batch of three done together. But I may miss the point of today if I focus too much on the horror of crucifixion. This obsession reached a climax in Mel Gibson’s almost pornographically sadistic horror movie, The Passion of Christ.

The gospels actually say nothing about the gory details, they simply state that Jesus was scourged and crucified. They do tell quite a bit about the political and religious pressures and machinations that led to his unjust execution, and they offer many insights into flawed religion and politics. But these are not the main message of the passion stories either.

The essential message of today is that Jesus died. John’s gospel in particular convinces me that Jesus had a unique relationship with God, yet he also says quite unequivocally that Jesus died, and that a spear was thrust through his heart, just to make sure. The great theologians of Nicea, three centuries later, decided by a substantial majority that Jesus was God. I might therefore have difficulty in believing he really died. Maybe the whole thing was just pretending. In fact the final word is that Christ is immortal. He is immortal, but he is also mortal, as mortal as we are. If political and religious conditions had been different, if people had been less ruthless in pursuit of their own narrow-minded logic, Jesus might have died in old age; but he would still have died.

If Jesus was God, then that means that even God suffers and dies. Suffering, death and resurrection are innate and continuous features of God’s incarnate being. The famous 17th century scientist and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, said that Christ suffers till the end of time. In Christ, I too am both mortal and immortal. (It is evidently possible to be both.) And Good Friday, by focusing on Jesus’ suffering and death, invites me to reflect upon my own vulnerability and mortality.

This is a perfectly healthy thing to do. People tend to be in denial about death. Even at funerals these days the “d” word is almost taboo. We are urged to celebrate the life of the departed one. Mourning his or her passing is permitted but not encouraged.

Unfashionable as it may be, I am moved to reflect on the place of death in my life, on what it means to be mortal, like Jesus. It means that I am embodied in a biological organism that has a finite life expectancy. And I am also part of a larger organism - Earth’s biosphere. Every plant and animal on Earth is organically interrelated. And everything lives, dies and is recycled into new living organisms. Birth, death and new birth constitute a continual process which my own body is part of.

As I meditate, my thoughts travel beyond Earth, to non-biological, astronomical objects and I find they too follow the same cyclic process. Galaxies, stars and planets form, exist for a few billion years and eventually disintegrate in various ways. The material is later recycled into new planets, stars and galaxies. Death and resurrection are cosmic phenomena.

But there is a difference between me and our galaxy or the Sun or planet Earth, or even the plants and other animals. I know I’m going to die; they don’t. I can even feel the process going on. I notice physical changes that tell me my body is approaching its use-by date. Some of my childhood friends are already compost or ashes.

I have mixed feelings about that. I am tempted to be anxious about what will happen to me after I die. Some people solve the problem by choosing to believe there is nothing; others create attractive fantasies. Some have claimed to have been there. I am more in sympathy with Hamlet, with his uncertainty about what might follow after he “shuffled off this mortal coil”.

Jesus and the New Testament writers urge me to be hopeful, and I freely choose that option. I do not expect that my faults and imperfections will be ignored or eliminated by magic. But I do believe that God is infinitely patient with me, and I must be patient with God. God’s uncompromising and persistent demand for perfection is sometimes hard to accept, but I know that, ultimately, God is not making deals.

So I trust and hope. I see wonderful signs in the world and in the universe around me. The new burst of life in spring, the cosmic evolution from chaos to order, from inert to living matter, towards higher and higher states of complexity and consciousness: all these miracles reinforce my optimism.

Looked at in the timescale of my own mortal lifespan, progress is desperately slow because evolutionary change takes millions or billions of years rather than centuries. In the immediate present and historic past everything seems frighteningly chaotic, and change to be imperceptible. But human history is only a tick of the cosmic clock.

With such hope I can, like Francis, begin to say, “Welcome Sister Death!” Of course, Francs really had had enough of his body. It was unbearably weak and painful. I am not in that state. I look forward to some more active and creative years. But death does not frighten me. It is not a taboo subject.

Some religious zealots thunder out scary fantasies, but they do not, I think, come from God. God hasn’t created hell; we have. And we live now in a purgatory of our own making. Anyway, there are better reasons for living responsibly and lovingly than fear of hell. A moral life, a loving life, is much happier than an immoral and selfish one – that is God’s message, and experience confirms it. Heaven is about living in love.

So I reflect on the death of Jesus - a horrifying event but, in view of what we humans are like, fairly inevitable. (We tend to hate prophetically good people.) As I reflect I can relate Jesus’ mortality to my own and to my certain death. The death and resurrection of Jesus is an invitation to share his perfect mortality by letting the Holy Spirit teach me godly and holy living. I am also invited to share his immortality, and I say yes, even though I don’t really know what it means.

You may be surprised when I say that my prayer begins at my bottom. At the risk of repeating what I have said elsewhere, I will tell you why.
It begins with St Paul. He referred many times in his letters to the body of Christ, by which he meant the community of faith. He declared that we are members, limbs and organs of the body of Christ. But he doesn’t stop there. He told the Colossians that, “all things in heaven and on earth were created” in Christ, and a few sentences further on, “in him all things hold together.”
St John, in the prologue to the fourth Gospel, says the same thing in a more imaginative way. “In the beginning was the Word (Greek, Logos), and the Word was God. He (the Logos) was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him.” He was referring to Jesus, the mortal human manifestation of an eternal and divine being who is infinitely more than a mortal man.
The word Logos (from which we get our word, logic) suggests the mind, the knowledge, the intention or wisdom of God, uttered not only through Jesus, but also in and through all things, our whole universe, and all universes if there are others. This is the embodiment of God. God is pure spirit, according to the Catholic Catechism, but not a disembodied spirit. The Bible knows nothing of disembodied spirits. Even angels in the Bible have bodies.
In recent times, theologians have taken to referring to the Cosmic Christ to distinguish the man Jesus from the eternal being Paul and John wrote of. The incarnation is manifest in all of physical nature, as well as being focused historically in Jesus. The leaders at the Council of Nicea finally defined the eternal incarnation of God as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
Recent discoveries in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology offer us a far richer understanding of our universe than Paul, John or the Nicene fathers had. It is no longer even seen as a collection of independent material objects waltzing around in space, under the influence of gravity, according to the principles of general relativity. An organic interdependence has been recognised, as intimate as the organic interdependence of the parts of our bodies. The universe is, in fact, a living organism.
Physicist Brian Swimme holds that the universe is not just a material entity; it is a spiritual event. We tend to separate spiritual and material reality. We speak of the “natural” and the “supernatural”. This dichotomy is a peculiarly Western notion. It is tenuously connected with Plato’s idealism, but we really owe it to the 17th century philosopher, René Descartes. ‘Cartesian’ dualism is firmly entrenched in Western philosophy and in Christianity today. Material objects are not permanent realities; they are events in the universal field of energy, the quantum vacuum. Scientists distinguish between energy and matter, but now recognise that they are of the same essential nature: matter is energy. Energy, on the other hand, is not seen as a temporary entity. The quantum vacuum is regarded as being outside time and space. This causes us to review our traditional dualism. Monism is gaining influence.
And it is important for our understanding of prayer. Prayer is an activity of the whole person. It is not my disembodied ‘spirit’ going walkabout on its own. Paul described an experience when he was unsure if he was “in the body or out of it”. But he was still feeling and thinking; he “heard words that cannot be uttered”. So his ‘spiritual’ experience was certainly embodied. The resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples suggest some sort of quasi-material body. I am one who believes that the gospel accounts refer to real experiences, even if their nature is uncertain.
And this has a practical application that has been discovered by many people. For me the best way to still my mind is to focus my attention on my body. I feel the pressure of the chair I am sitting on. This is what I mean by beginning with my bottom. It is the start of a process of feeling my relationship to the world around me, and ultimately to God, immanent in the world. I try not to leap too quickly into thinking about distant things and situations. I spend a little time getting ‘in touch’ with my body, literally ‘coming to my senses’, then to the traffic on the road, the birds in the garden and other local sounds. I can ask myself in what way God loves the source of these. Only then do I allow my attention to move outward, to things beyond the range of my senses: the wider community, its wisdom and its foolishness, its happiness and its pain.
This is a danger point. I have to make an effort not to wander off aimlessly in my imagination and thinking. There is a purpose in connecting myself to the outside in this way. It is to feel myself part of it all, and to look for epiphanies and miracles of God in nature and in acts of generosity, kindness, tolerance and forgiveness. So I still need to focus my mind.
I also perceive God in what I know of the continuous creative process going on throughout the universe – new plants, animals and people, new planets, new stars, new galaxies, coming into being from the remnants of those that have previously lived and died. The death and resurrection of the Cosmic Christ is happening all the time throughout the universe.
This reflection on the wider universe also gives me a sense of proportion. I ask myself why I think that our human species is of such tremendous importance in the cosmic scheme of things. Even Jesus said that the very hairs of our heads are numbered, and that that every sparrow is important too. But I don’t think this is a statement about our relative importance or the sparrow’s; I think it is a statement about the intensity of God’s love. When we speak of natural things we are speaking of God’s incarnate self, his only begotten Son, God’s cosmic incarnation, the Second person of the Trinity. God’s love of the world and us is his love of himself too.
Finally I come back to myself. Where am I? What am I doing? What am I going to do today? The answers to those questions are of miniscule cosmic impact, but they are important for me because I have real responsibilities as part of the cosmic organism, however small.

When things go unexpectedly well we say, “Thank God!” And sometimes we really believe that God has intervened on our behalf, has diverted nature from the course it would naturally take. Such a belief is quite harmless and may even give a boost to an individual’s personal religion. On the other hand, when some catastrophe occurs or some unspeakable act of injustice or violence, we say, “Where was God? Why didn’t he prevent this?” Individual religious faith may then be threatened. So sometimes we believe that God has used some kind of magic on our behalf that we call a miracle, and sometimes we doubt if God even knows how to operate properly the nature he himself created.

Both these notions are wrong. There is no such thing as magic, whether we dignify it with the name miracle or not. Miracle means ‘something that causes wonder’; magic means actions or events that subvert or intervene in the workings of nature. No doubt things happen that we cannot explain, but that does not mean that the “laws” of nature have been broken; it means that nature is stranger then we think. If we imagine that science knows everything about nature, then we may think, quite wrongly, that the laws of nature have been broken. Nature, as conceived by God, is completely consistent, coherent and rational, and is more resourceful than we can imagine.

What is perplexing is the unpredictability. When we are dealing with simple mechanical systems, predictions can be made with the help of mathematical equations. But in spite of what many people believe, nature is not a simple mechanical system. At the most basic, atomic level there is inherent uncertainty. This was only discovered last century, giving rise to quantum theory. At the most basic level, scientists can only calculate ratios of probability. No outcome is certain; none is impossible. So, is God in charge or not? Does nature have absolute freedom to do what it likes – what scientists call randomness? That question deserves careful thought.

What is the relationship between physical nature and the Holy Trinity? We are taught that God created everything “ex nihilo” (out of nothing). Physical nature, then, is entirely of God, the source and essence of all being: conceived of God in the womb of God; born of God as dynamic, intensely active yet ordered energy in space and time. God possesses limitless energy, space and time. Within this infinite potential, God is incarnate, embodied. God is pure spirit, but not disembodied spirit. Saint Paul referred to a spiritual body when writing of life beyond death. The idea of a disembodied spirit was meaningless to him. The resurrection stories emphasise the bodily-ness of the risen Christ too. Embodiment is of the essence of God; that is why we have the Second Person of the Trinity.

The Second Person of the Trinity, begotten of God, is not only the man Jesus. St Paul and St John said that everything is in Christ and through Christ. In fact, if Christ is divine, then he is not a finite entity at all. God’s incarnation, his embodiment, is everything that is and can possibly be. As well as being absolutely transcendent to physical nature, God is also totally immanent in it, because God cannot be relatively or partially anything. God does not have degrees of being; he is not fragmented into parts. His incarnate self is everything, everywhere, and of equal status and “coeternal” with his transcendent self. Seen through the eyes of Paul, John and modern cosmology, this is what the Nicene Creed says. Physical nature is God’s embodiment. Physicist Brian Swimme has said that our universe is not a material object; it is a spiritual event. The Cartesian separation of body and spirit is a philosophical aberration peculiar to Western thinking.

So why doesn’t the “Father” discipline the “Son” more effectively? Why is nature, especially humankind, allowed to play up so? God has absolute freedom. If the “Son” is co-equal with the “Father” (Nicene Creed again), then God incarnate has absolute freedom too. Nature, including humankind, has a terrifying degree of freedom. And there, perhaps, we may have a theological explanation of quantum uncertainty!

But that is not much comfort to the survivors of the Holocaust or other victims of disasters. Are we then helpless victims of absolutely random chance? No. Cosmic optimists, Christians for example, believe that there is an underlying motive for existence – love. We believe, in fact, that God is love. Love is what constrains the universe in some kind of order, astronomically through gravity, socially through some sense that prevents us from being quite as dreadful as we could possibly be; call it conscience perhaps.

As an individual I have only a simplistic and hazy notion of what love is. Divine love is much more far-sighted and wise than I can comprehend. Jesus and many other holy people have been able to focus human love in miraculous ways, such as healing the sick. This focussing of love is called faith, and Jesus wished there was much more of it. But even when faith is lacking, love still operates, only in a more obscure and often delayed way. Good eventually comes out of evil, we say. From stars to humans and everything else, the new emerges to replace what dies – resurrection.

I cannot pretend to understand God’s technology of love. As St Paul said, God’s wisdom looks like foolishness to us. But I have seen enough evidence to convince me that there is a purpose, and to permit me to believe that the ultimate outcome is to be good. And my belief in God is not in some disembodied entity outside the universe or permeating the space between things. I believe that God is the source, the essence and the totality of all being, including physical nature.

The problem of evil and suffering remains. But I don’t see this as a technical problem for God to solve. I see it as inherent in the transcendent mystery of existence in the process of becoming what it truly is. Why is God taking this utterly baffling journey? Why did his special human incarnation, Jesus, have to endure the greatest cruelty his contemporaries could inflict? It seems that, in choosing not only to be but also to become, God has chosen to suffer till the end of time. God has no technical fix, only the immanent energy of love, the Holy Spirit.

Even for those who possess that cosmic optimism that emerges as religious belief, it is necessary to recognise that there are hazards in the way. There are con artists and false signposts that will leave you stranded far away from the happiness you believe can be yours. There’s a story in two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, which offers great insight into the traps that await the unwary.

Things really begin with Jesus’ baptism by John, first described by Mark. On that occasion God spoke to Jesus saying, “You are my Son, my beloved one.” That is a way of saying, “You are the Messiah.” No doubt Jesus was thrilled by this divine confirmation of what John and others had been suggesting for some time, but he wisely took time out to think about this stupendous vocation.

The description of the mental struggle Jesus went through is very like a parable. It looks as though Jesus intended it to be a teaching story and he has carefully crafted it accordingly. There are several lessons to be learned.

One of the first things I notice is Satan quoting from the Bible. I am often struck by how the Bible can be used to promote hatred, intolerance, injustice, war and violence, or to intimidate and manipulate the ignorant, credulous and vulnerable. The Bible was used to promote slavery in the 19th century and is still used as an excuse for anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, male chauvinism, unjust discrimination and religious intolerance. Jesus quoted Scripture, but most often it was to challenge religious leaders about their misunderstanding and abuse of it. Sometimes he overruled it altogether. I have to say, the Bible is not always the source of all truth; it can be made the source of very serious error.

Jesus’ temptations were related to his realization that he was the Messiah. It was a particular crisis in his own personal life. We are tempted differently, less dramatically, by common life situations. But Jesus’ three temptations are archetypal. That is to say, each stands for a whole range of temptations, and they identify areas in which we are all vulnerable.

I wonder if you noticed that there is one thing in common with all three temptations. They are all about taking short cuts, and we all love a short cut when we spot it.

“Command that these stones be made bread.” Jesus enjoyed a good feed as much as anyone. In fact he was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. But, even now, when he was really hungry, he knew he was not into magic. In fact, there’s no such thing as magic. Satan is the ultimate liar. Magic, if it existed, would be the ultimate short cut to get what you want. A lot of people in Jesus’ time, and some even today, think there really is such a thing as magic, or even think Jesus could do it. Jesus simply pointed out that Satan had his priorities all wrong. In any case, God doesn’t work that way, and nor would he.

Next, Satan showed Jesus all the wealth of the world: “I shall give to you all this power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. 
All this will be yours, if you worship me.” He offered Jesus another short cut, but again it was a thumping lie. The only wealth and power Satan had was what he had accrued by fraud and trickery. If Jesus was Messiah he was destined to rule the world. Even to become the President of the United States requires many millions of dollars and enormous influence in high places. Satan’s misappropriated wealth and power could be a great help. But Jesus believed God had a better way than spending megabucks and patrolling the corridors of power. Today, it still seems that he made a terrible choice from his own point of view. It needs a lot of explaining.

In my eighties, I am a bit past climbing church towers, but Jesus had got himself to the highest point of the Jerusalem temple, so he must have left the desert. Satan saw an opportunity. “If you are the Messiah, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you;
and
with their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.’” (Ps 91) His underlying argument was that, if you’re going to get on, you’ve got to impress people. Here’s a quick way to do this where it counts, here in Jerusalem. Everyone loves a spectacular stunt. You’ll be an instant celebrity.

Of course it’s all lies again. If people take insane risks God may be horrified, but he won’t interfere with our freedom. It’s up to us what we do with our lives. Some people seek thrills. Jumping off tall buildings is a sure way to get that charge of adrenaline they are addicted to. Sometimes stunts have a more practical benefit – if we bring them off, we could get fabulous sponsorship fees from advertisers. You and I will probably have more common temptations – a lie perhaps. If you can get away with it, it will give you an advantage. There is a risk, but it’s worth it. And, if you get found out, you can always say you were misinformed (as our illustrious leaders tend to do).

I’m not saying you shouldn’t take risks. Almost everything worthwhile involves risk and danger; so by all means be courageous. But be critical, be prudent; above all be patient. Ask yourself, is this particular goal worth this particular risk?

Does any of this ring any bells with you? It certainly does with me. I often find myself thinking of a short cut to something I want: probably something quite trivial. The trick may be risky, it may be stupid or it may be downright immoral. These situations happen all the time in ordinary lives like ours.

I don’t know where the suggestions come from: Satan perhaps, or simply our endemic self-centeredness. But we’ve got to be watchful. Like the Psalmist said: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” And I like to think of those guardian angels Satan referred to, not to perform magical rescue operations, but warning us of danger. Satan and angels are mythical beings, but they stand for very real experiences in our lives - experiences of being human.

In the gospels there are six accounts of occasions when Jesus fed a huge crowd of people with just a handful of food. I find it difficult to imagine these events happening in real life because crowds of people don’t generally go off with charismatic teachers to lonely spots these days. But apparently in Northern Palestine (Galilee) in Jesus’ time this sort of thing did happen. The region was a hotbed of political unrest. The Jewish people were fiercely nationalistic and greatly resented the Roman occupying forces. There were rebel movements springing up all the time, gathered round charismatic leaders.

New testament scholar, Prof. Allen Calaghan of Harvard Divinity School, describes a typical one of these charismatic characters:

“Some guy wakes up in the morning and he thinks he’s the Messiah or something. Or he’s a prophet, and he gets a group of people to follow him. He says, ‘We’re going to go out in the desert and we’re going to an empty place. We’re going to go out there and we’re going to wait for God to do something for us.’ So a whole bunch of people go with him, maybe thousands, go with him out to this deserted place . . . . “

This basically describes what Jesus did in these gospel stories, but the story writers believed that Jesus was really the true Messiah, as Christians do today, and they describe specifically what God did for the multitude – he provided food. The gospel authors saw this as a real sign from heaven, a breaking in of the kingdom of God.

So let’s look more closely at what happened. Most of the people had travelled a considerable distance from home and the afternoon was wearing on. Generally, if someone was going out to work or travelling for the day, they’d take some food with them in a little wicker basket or woven bag called a ’scrip’. But many might have joined the crowd on the spur of the moment, so the disciples suggested to Jesus that they wind up proceedings so that people who needed to could get to the nearest village store for food before it closed. Jesus, however, told them to provide what was needed themselves. They were flabbergasted, of course. They had brought a little food, but what use would that be?

My favourite of all these stories is the one by John. In this a small boy, who heard what was being said perhaps, offered his own food to Andrew. Andrew was very touched and told Jesus. Jesus then told the disciples to hand round the boy’s food: two fish and five bread rolls.

A remarkable thing happened. For the small group of disciples to distribute food to thousands of people would have taken hours but, suddenly, food seemed to appear everywhere. Some people believe the food dropped from the sky or just materialised out of thin air or something, but that is just idle speculation. I want to focus on the boy’s inspiring act of generosity. I believe this is the key to understanding what happened. I believe that this was the sign from heaven, the breaking in of God’s kingdom. The boy was an authentic kingdom person. What he did was an example, and acts like that have an effect on people. What happened was a sign of how things are in the kingdom of heaven.

The broad message of Jesus’ two feeding miracles is that God provides plenty for everyone if we follow the ways of his kingdom. But, no matter what we do, whether we are kingdom people or selfish individualists, it is all, ultimately, a gift from God.

But there is another important part of the gospel writers’ agenda – the central act of Christian worship, the Eucharist. At the last meal Jesus had with his disciples, the night before he was killed, he did an odd thing. He passed bread and wine round saying that they were his body and blood. The tellers of that story believed that Jesus was a unique and perfect human manifestation of God’s wisdom, God as a human being. This is a foundational tenet of Christianity still. So what Jesus did was a symbolic way of indicating, not only that God provides all we need in life, but also that he provides it from his own being, his own body.

That’s a way-out thought, but it makes sense. Christians believe that God created the universe from nothing (ex nihilo). What does that phrase mean? Even in what the book of Genesis calls ‘the deep’, the ‘formless void’, and what modern physicists call the ‘quantum vacuum’, there is God. So the ‘nihilo’ was, in effect, God himself. The raw material of the universe was God. By universe I do not mean an entity of which there may be more than one, but the totality of physical existence; some call it the ‘multiverse’. The universe, then, is God’s body, or his ‘incarnation’ to use the theological term. (This is not to compromise our belief that Jesus was the perfect human manifestation of God’s wisdom – his ‘logos’). So everything we eat and drink, the air we breathe, the sun that provides the energy of life, gravity and the other fields of energy – all this is the body of God. The Eucharist can be seen as an affirmation of the sacredness of physical nature.

We are part of that cosmic Body ourselves; we are specialised little images of God. Read up what scientists have to say on fractal theory or holography. It’s about every tiny part of a larger whole containing all the information of the whole. It’s not easy to follow but it relates closely to the Bible idea of us being “in the image of God”.

This may all sound like obscure theology, but Christians believe that a basic grasp of the message of the Gospels is a key to understanding the meaning of existence. They unlock the deepest wisdom. Religious people call it salvation. They believe too that sharing in the Eucharist with an understanding of its significance will also reveal deep truth and eternal life. This belief goes back to the earliest days of Christianity, before the Gospels were written.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to grasp these meanings; you don’t need a whole lot of theology. When I said a basic grasp, that’s what I meant. For most people it’s intuitive. You either get it or you don’t.