Matthew under the arm 137

A wealthy pilgrim joined us for two days. A delicate looking man, he wore fine clothes, too fine for a long pilgrimage. Some distance back, he had heard Columba give a talk in a barn on the Christian life about the important dynamics in being a Christian: to pray and to love in action. He wanted to know more. Our new companion, took us into an inn and bought us a hearty supper. All those in the inn recognised him as a wealthy man. An old man approached him and started to insult him for his wealth and the lack of wear and tear on his face and hands. Columba turned to the old man and growled. [Beware of Columba’s growl!] “Your skin is hard and cracked from hard work and hard weather, but so is your heart and your mind. This man has opened his heart to the risk of God.”

Matthew 27.57-61
A burial place, particularly wealthy and powerful Jews, would not only be in keeping with their life-style but also be a place of ‘permanence’, where they could be remembered. In that sense, the memory of the dead person would live on in others. So it was a considerable sacrifice for Joseph of Arimathaea to make his own tomb available for Christ. Legend has it that Joseph came to Britain with the Holy Grail, a unfounded connectedness that ‘Celtic’ Christianity may have had to the passage of the ‘relics’ of Jesus life through Europe. This intriguing ‘walk on’ part in the Passion narrative is perhaps a deep reassurance to most of us who feel at some distance from the centre of the story.

I WOULD HOLD ALL I AM AND HAVE BEFORE YOU IN OBEDIENCE TO YOUR LOVE.

This passage is one of the wonderful Gospel stories in which silence is so demonstrative of love, gentleness and generosity. The two Marys sitting opposite the tomb create that wonderful image of looking and listening with complete attention. In this exercise, in your own imagination, go back to a time when you were silent and were able to look and listen. What did it feel like for you? What was happening? Where in your life now do you feel you are being called to be a listener…someone who looks and gives attention? Give a little time to an occasion when you did not listen or look, when perhaps that might have been helpful. Now, in prayer, what do have which is most precious to you, that you would give out of love, out of love for Christ.

+Martin
Bishop of Argyll and The Isles

Matthew under the arm 136

We had walked off the path, to sit for a while and look at the snow covered landscape that was now piercingly painful to look at in the bright sun. Columba’s fingers were blue with cold. His breath was laboured as he sat on a rock and tried to shield his eyes. We had left a village that morning, lucky not get beaten up. He had been invited to speak about our pilgrimage in the local church. Instead, Columba quietly chided the congregation that they were sitting there well-clothed and protected. ‘Homeless families are struggling to find warmth and you exclude them from the Church after they had been sleeping at the back overnight.’ The priest was furious. ‘You have taken advantage of my invitation to you to preach!’ Columba replied in the hearing of all as he left: ‘I haven’t started yet!’ For two days, we huddled with the families, until we were thrown out of the town for breach of the peace. God?

Matthew 27:45-56

The cry of God. Here was Jesus, God in History crying across the whole Universe, audible in every corner of it. Forsaken, Christ accompanies all those who feel abandoned by God; all those who experience His absence. In the blackest of black holes somewhere in space, the cry still echoes: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ Yes, it’s a quotation from a psalm. The cry can be explained away but to no one’s satisfaction. The question ‘Why?’, is by its very nature never met with a satisfactory answer, let alone solution. God enters his own abandonment. In the middle of the terrifying earthquake and storm, at the moment of abandonment, the centurion recognises Jesus as the ‘Son of God’.

THAT IN THE PLACES OF FEAR, DESOLATION AND THE EXPERIENCE OF YOUR ABSENCE, I MAY REMAIN THERE AND WAIT ON YOU.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic starkly suggested that we cannot come to real belief in God without a real experience of atheism! Many of the great men and women of faith, seem to experience the Real Absence of God as well as the Real Presence. So allow yourself to experience in this moment of silent prayer a time when you not only did not believe in God, but felt the weight of his absence. Then feel yourself ‘cry out’ with Jesus about your sense of being abandoned. Maybe that describes where you are now! Remain with that experience. Now recall when you had an inkling of his presence. Both of the experiences are vital.

+Martin
Bishop of Argyll and The Isles