Steward of the Wildest Mystery

Scientists speak of intelligent life among the stars, of how at the speed of light there is no time, of consciousness as more than just an epiphenomenon of the physical brain. Doctors speak seriously about life after death, and not just the mystics anymore but the housewife, the stockbrocker, the high-school senior speak about an inner world where reality becomes transparent to a reality realer still. The joke of it is that often it is the preacher who as steward of the wildest mystery of them all is the one who hangs back, prudent, cautious, hopeless mature and wise to the last when no less than Saint Paul tells him to be a fool for Christ's sake, no less than Christ tells him to be a child for his own and the kingdom's sake.

Let the preacher tell the truth . . . . And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that "catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears," which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.  

-Listening to Your Life “Steward of the Wildest Mystery”

Marriage

They say they will love, comfort, honor each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and befaithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it, but even-for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health-when they don't feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they make at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other's burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly, than they are to unbind legally. The question is, what do they get in return?

They get each other in return. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping their rash, quixotic promises, they never have to face the world quite alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they're lucky, even after the first passion passes, they still have a kindness and a patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get through the night with, to wake into the new day beside. If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don't have children, they each become the other's child.

They both still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in heaven is one where they become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Mary

The time their twelve-year-old got lost in Jerusalem and they finally found him in the Temple, Mary said, "Behold,thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing" (Luke 2:48), and as things turned out, it was a shadow of things to come.

It's not hard to imagine her sorrowing again when Jesus left a good, steady job in Nazareth to risk his neck wandering around all over creation to proclaim whatever it was he thought he was proclaiming. Part of her sorrow was presumably that she loved him too much for himself instead of for the wild and holy business he thought he'd been called to. Another part must have been that like just about everybody else who was closest to him in Nazareth, she never really understood what he thought he was doing and may well have been one of the ones who, when he went back home once, decided he must be off his rocker. "He is beside himself," they said (Mark 3:21) and tried to lock him up for his own good.

Maybe some of the things he said to her didn't sound as bad in Aramaic as they do in English, but even so, she can't have been too happy about the time she told him the wine was running out at the wedding in Cana, and he said, "Woman, what have you to do with me?" (John 2:4), or the time they came and told him his mother was waiting outside for him, and he said, "Who is my mother?" (Matthew 12:48), adding that whoever did the will of his father who was in heaven, that was who his mother was.

For all the sentimentalizing that their relationship has come in for since, there's no place in the Gospels where he speaks some special, loving word or does some special, loving thing for the woman who gave him birth. You get the idea that he felt he couldn't belong truly to anybody unless he somehow belonged equally to everybody. They were all his mothers and brothers and sisters, and there's no place in the record where he offers her anything more than he offered everybody else.

No place, that is, except at the very end when, cross-eyed with pain, he looked down from where they'd nailed him and saidsomething just for her. Even here he didn't call her his mother, just "woman" again, and he didn't say good-bye to her or anything like that. But it's as if here at last he finally spoke to the awful need he must have always sensed in her. "Behold your son," he said, indicating the disciple who was standing beside her, and then to the disciple, "Behold your mother" (John 19:26-27).

It was his going-away present to her really, somebody to be the son to her that he had had no way of being himself, what with a world to save, a death to die. He would be present in that disciple, he seemed to be saying, for her to live for, and to live for her. Beyond that, he would be present in generation after generation for her to mother, the Mater Dolorosa who seeks him always, and sorrowing, everywhere she goes.

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Mary Magdalene

It is sometimes held that Mary Magdalene was the woman Luke tells about whom, to the righteous horror of Simon the Pharisee, Jesus let wash his feet and dry them with her hair despite her highly unsavory reputation, and about whom Jesus said, "I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven because she loved much" (Luke 7:47). It's a powerful story, and it would be nice to think that Mary Magdalene is the one it's about, but unfortunately there's no really good reason for doing so.

When Jesus was on the road with his disciples, he had a group of women with him whom he'd cast evil spirits out of once and who had not only joined up with him, but all chipped in to help meet expenses. One of them was Mary Magdalene, and in her case it was apparently not just one evil spirit that had been cast out but seven.Just what her problem had been, nobody says, but, helped along by the story in Luke, tradition has it that she'd been a whore. Maybe so. In any case, she seems to have teamed up with Jesus early in the game and to have stuck with him to the end. And beyond.

It's at the end that she comes into focus most clearly. She was one of the women who was there in the background when he was being crucified-she had more guts than most of them had-and she was also one of the ones who was there when they put what was left of him in the tomb. But the time that you see her best is on that first Sunday morning after his death.

John is the one who gives the greatest detail, and according to him it was still dark when she went to the tomb to discover that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance and that, inside, it was empty as a drum. She ran back to wherever the disciples were hiding out to tell them, and Peter and one of the others returned with her to check out her story. They found out that it was true and that there was nothing there except some pieces of cloth the body had been wrapped in. They left then, but Mary stayed on outside the tomb someplace and started to cry. Two angels came and asked her what she was crying about, and she said, "Because they have taken away my lord, and I do not know where they have laid him" (John 20:13). She wasn't thinking in terms of anything miraculous, in other words; she was thinking simply that even in death they wouldn't let him be and somebody had stolen his body.

Then another person came up to her and asked the same questions. Why was she crying? What was she doing there? She decided it must be somebody in charge, like the gardener maybe, and she said if he was the one who had moved the body somewhere else, would he please tell her where it was so she could go there. Instead of answering her, he spoke her name-Mary-and then she recognized who he was, and though from that instant forward the whole course of human history was changed in so many profound and complex ways that it's impossible to imagine how it would have been different otherwise, for Mary Magdalene the only thing that had changed was that, for reasons she was in no state to consider, her old friend and teacher and strong right arm was alive again. "Rabboni!" she shouted and was about to throw her arms around him for sheer joy and astonishment when he stopped her.

"Noli me tangere," he said. "Touch me not. Don't hold on to me" (John 20:17),thus making her not only the first person in the world to have her heart stop beating for a second to find him alive again when she'd thought he was dead as a doornail, but the first person also to have her heart break a little to realize that he couldn't be touched anymore, wasn't there anymore as a hand to hold on to when the going got tough, a shoulder to weep on, because the life in him was no longer a life she could know by touching it, with her here and him there, but a life she could know only by living it: with her here-old tart and retread, old broken-heart and last, best friend-and with him here too, alive inside her life, to raise her up also out of the wreckage of all that was wrecked in her and dead.

In the meanwhile, he had much to do and far to go, he said, and so did she, and the first thing she did was go back to the disciples to report. "I have seen the Lord," she said, and whatever dark doubts they might have had on the subject earlier, one look at her face was enough to melt them all away like morning mist.

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Matthew

The apostle Matthew was a tax collector, and one of the Gospels bears his name. Like Mark's, the book was written anonymously and the name attached to it later. Maybe it contains some of Matthew's recollections buried in it somewhere. Maybe not. In any case, it's the man who wrote it who's of chief interesthere, and all we know about him is what his book tells us. He didn't write it from scratch, but included virtually all of Mark in it plus a collection of the sayings of Jesus that seems to have been floating around plus some other material peculiar to him. It's what he did with it all that tells the kind of man he was.

What he did with it especially was to show that if, on the one hand, faith in Jesus was as new as a newborn babe, on the other hand, it was as old as the hills. As very likely a Jew himself, Matthew knew his Torah, and according to him Jesus was what the Torah was all about, whether anybody knew it or not. Much of his life was foretold there, Matthew keeps saying, and he loved to give examples. "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel," the prophet Isaiah had said, and Matthew nailed his idea that Mary was a virgin to that (Matthew 1:23). Jesus was born at Bethlehem, and that's just where the prophet Micah had said he'd be born (2:6). Hosea was the one who predicted the flight into Egypt when Jesus was still on his mother's knee (2:15), and it was Zechariah who said he'd come riding into Jerusalem on a donkey like a king great in his humbleness and humble in his greatness (21:5). But things like this were mere window dressing compared with the main thing Matthew wanted to say.

The main thing he wanted to say was that, although Jesus was born in the sticks and never had two cents to rub together and was ignored by just about everybody who mattered and was strung up in the end between two crooks, he was the same Messiah, the same Christ, the same Anointed of the Lord, that for centuries Israel had been waiting for with tears in its eyes. Everything Matthew wrote was aimed at convincing people that this was so and that to accept it was to find eternal life and that to deny it was to be like the Pharisees to whom Jesus said, "Woe to you . . . sons of those who murdered the prophets . . . you serpents, you brood of vipers, how areyou to escape being sentenced to hell?" (23:29-33). Nobody loved the Jews more than Matthew did, writing till he was blue in the face so they would believe and be saved, but nobody was harder on them either. It was Matthew who added to Mark's account the terrible words they spoke when Pilate washed his hands of the whole grim business: "His blood be on us and on our children" (27:25).

Jesus was the Messiah, Matthew said, and he was also a second Moses, giving his Sermon on the Mount just as Moses had brought the tablets down from Mt. Sinai, but taking the fierce old stone and making pure gold of it. "You have heard that it was said 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' but I say to you, do not resist one who is evil" (5:38-39). "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbors and hate your enemies,' but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (5:43-44). As Matthew saw it, Jesus came not to drown the old law out, as the Jews supposed, but to make it sing anew, like an angel.

It worried him a little the way in Mark's Gospel the Son of God sometimes sounds so much like anybody's son, and he did what he could to make him sound more godly. Where Mark wrote that when Jesus healed the leper, he was "moved with pity" (Mark 1:41), Matthew leaves out the pity and says he just healed him. When Mark says he looked at the people who objected to miracles on the Sabbath "with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart" (Mark 3:5), Matthew leaves that out too. He won't let him "sigh deeply" when they ask him for a sign (Mark 8:12), and Mark's "he could do no mighty work" in his own hometown (Mark 6:5) becomes just "he did not" do any in Matthew (13:58). "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone," Jesus says in Mark to the man who greets him that way (Mark 10:18), and Matthew tinkers with it till it reads, "Why do you ask me about what is good?" (19:17). You can't blame him for tinkering really. He can't help retouching thephotograph when he loves its subject so-making the warts a little less wartlike, the miracles a little more miraculous-and in the end he lets him at least die like a man as well as like a God with the same dark cry that Mark reports-"My God, my God, why have you let me down?" (27:46).

Mark ends his Gospel with the women tearing out of the empty tomb in terror. Things were happening beyond their power to cope with, "and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid" (Mark 16:8). But in Matthew the angel tells them not to be. "Don't be afraid," he says (28:5). There was no reason to be afraid, Matthew says. It was all set down right there in the Torah if you just knew how to read it right. Hadn't Isaiah written, "He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will any one hear his voice in the streets; he will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick"? (12:19-20). Such a man as that, so gentle and kind, was bound to come to such an end. There was no need to be afraid. And yet wasn't it written also, "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region of the shadow of death, light has dawned" (4:16)? Dawned for the gentle man himself, and for the frightened women, and dawned for everyone else too who would only hear and believe.

The women took the angel's word to heart apparently because, though "they departed quickly from the tomb with fear," Matthew says, they departed also with "great joy" and ran to tell the disciples what had happened because they couldn't hold it in any longer (28:8). And just in case there should be any question as to what their great joy was all about, Matthew ends his Gospel with words that explain it. "Lo, I am with you always," Jesus says, "even unto the end of the world" (28:20), and for once Matthew felt that no Old Testament reference was necessary.

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words