Fourth Sunday of Epiphany: Ergo Sunday

 Accepit ergo Jesus panes: et cum gratias egisset, distribuit discumbentibus: similiter et ex piscibus quantum volebant.

Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.

Jn 6.11

12 Ut autem impleti sunt, dixit discipulis suis: Colligite quæ superaverunt fragmenta, ne pereant.

When I came to occult I thought it would be something like Wicca, celebrating some recently made up Wheel of the Year, but in the last not quite twenty years it is had become much more medieval, much more Christian: if esoterically so. In these last years the occult has become the through link between now and the ancient times and the through link for us is Catholicism. 

So, much to my surprise, here I am reviving Epiphany, doing what I can with old feast days that even the modern churches have wiped like intricate drawnigs in the sand. These next two Sundays as we approach the end of Epiphany mirror the last two Sundays of Lent. Where Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday repeat the same service, Ergo Sunday and Panis Vitae Sunday have their chief readings as the first and second part of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Saint John. The entirety of the sixth chapter is read on both weekends, but the emphasis is on the first and second part at each narthex.

The feeding of the five thousand is one of the stories that is in every Gospel and John, who does not use his Holy Thursday narrative to tell the story of the Eucharist places his bread of life discourse here, using Jesus's miraculous feeding of the crowd as the springboard to speak of the nature of Jesus and the nature of God's providence. Even though he does not reference Jesus as the Passover Lamb or tell this story at Passover, he remarks that "It was near Passover" something no other Gospel does. While Mark tells us that the disciples were afraid when they were in the storm and Jesus walked across the water to them because" they did not yet understand the meaning of the loaves and fishes", it is in John that this story is sandwiched inside of the Bread of Life Discourse."

What have we learned so far? Just two things or maybe three? That God is able to provide. We live in a model of Victorian (white people) almost Republican charity. It is careful charity, a little bit of giving. We don't want to get carried away, and we have told ourselves God subscribes to this cheap economy. The rich stay rich by handing onto their things. But Jesus is more than rich. He is infinite and so he feeds the people not just enough, but until they want no more, people who probably wanted a lot. He feeds from the most generous impulse and if we take Jesus seriously as an acutal man, he does so not thinking of the consequences, not thinking that this riotous display of power will cause them to "come after him to make him king." 

I am currently reading a set of stories where one of the features is that in a group of boys one is very poor and resentful. He clings to his pride and resentfulness about working long hours and having sleepless nights over a job to get the things his rich friends can simply snap their fingers and attain. Christianity as we live in it has that proud poor boy strain in it. You hear it when people say, "I wouldn't pray to God for that..." or "I almost prayed." Jesus is, as the hymn goes, "A Spendthrift Lover." but we won't let him love us. The Disciples are not expecting this uprush of protection and providence and truly, neither are we.

Forgiveness?

 i began to writing this blog, imagining taking myself through one gospel painfully, one story at a time nad opening it up and looking at it, but the problem was at that time my Bible reading was sporadic at best. I think I only considered myself sporadically Christian. Now I must udnerstand that I am heretically Chrisian but Christian all the time, and living the story or the stories of the Gospels all the time. This is what a Christian is, someone who lives in the story of Jesus, as it is written in the gospels, as it has been imagiend by the churches and lastly, but not nearly as often as it should be, by the individual Christian.

All week in Sickle and Axe I have been writign about the Wedding at Cana, for we are in the Season of Epiphany and the stories were are now living in are the gradual revelations of the glory of Jesus as son of God and son of Man. But the other story I am inhabiting, that all Christian do is the story of the sermon on the mount of our morality, how we deal with the people around us, with the ways we are treated and treat others. This is a less itneresting story, but one which dominates us.And it does dominate.

Neitzhe had little good to say about Christianity and thought it was the religion of the slave. He thought the whole Abarhamic prodject was. He and many pagans speak of a diffrent, purer and more reasonable not to mention just religion never remembering or perhaps never knowing that the bulk of people could never have practices it, that most of the time most people have been unempowered and that we don't have much knowledge of what those religions weren't. But we can speak of Christianity. It is written down and written down in it is a great contradiction. It might seem kinder to call it paradox, but paradox is mysterious. This is no mystery. the story of Christianity, the claim of Christianity comes out of a radical Judaism and shares the vision of the psalms, punishment for the wicked, reward for the righteous and relief for the suffering, a radical reversal of the way things have been, valleys raised and mountains lowered.

But the Sermon on the Mount tells us to love our enemies like our friends, that our love should be as indifferent as the sun or the rain which shines on the good and the bad alike. Jesus and then Saint Paul tell us to bless our enemies, to pick up their burdens, to never take revenge or curse those who wrong us. Jesys even insists that the reason to make amends is so we are not dragged off to jail. This Jesus--who doesn't seem greatly concerned with making the world right--incidentally is not in the oldest gospel==Mark. And this Jesus is, to say the least, troublesome. Not only is he at odds with the expected justice, he is at odds with himself. As the New Testament stands we have, often, a story that tells of a promised Messiah coming into the world to transform it and not changing it at all, but not demanding that we change it either. Of one a Jesus who decries wrongdoing, but also says doe not resist it, one who, seen through the lense of Paul also declares that the status quo, including slavery, is a okay and that one should pray for the governors and rulers appointed by God and keep their insignificant noses to the grindstone. What's more, it doesn't matter that this world is a crappy one and that we do not have the tools to change it because Jesus is bringing a new one soon. This hope of Jesus bringing a new world is translated to the pie in the sky, the heaven after you die Christianity which has fostered evil and been a bedtime story for the suffering for twenty centuries.

There is no bigger sign of this than the idea of forgiveness. In the Hiding Place Corey Tin Boom remarks that she met one of the men who had tortured her and was responsible for killing her sister in the concentration camp. He greeted her joyfully telling her he was a Christian and asking (I would say demanding) her forgiveness. Tin Boom says that an eternity passed in her mind, but that she remembered Jesus saying the condition for her forgiveness by him was her forgiveness of all, she exercised an act of will over what she wanted and stretched out her hand in forgiveness to this man.

We are so used to this story that a similar story with  different ending was unexpected. A jailer from the notorious Angola prison approached a dying Black man who had bee nfalsely imprisoned there, who he had known to be innocent and whom he had tottured. He asked his forgiveness. This man was not bothered by Tin Boom's principals and promptly said he would never forgive him, please leave, and then swiftly turned around and died.

Tin Boom was certainly welcome to her forgiveness, but the principal of forgiveness as expressed in Christianity is wrong, in fact it's a little monstrous. The idea that we are all equally guilty in the eyes of a fictionalized Father in the Sky and that we cannot expereince his forgiveness or escape hell unless we forgive, pretend to forgive or give a pass to every person who has done us ill, is ridiculous. That someone who has killed your sister or robbed you of your dignity and your life should also get to exact from you the joy of forgiveness is disgusting. That this forgiveness should be offered to people who hadn't even asked for it as well, the extedned meaning of turning the other cheek, is stroke inducing.

The mandatory forgiveness for all principal in Christianity is one that is in favor of the wrong and the powerful, always, and robs from the wrong and weak. It is also dishonest, for how many people told by Jesus they must automatically forgive, have done so with gritted teeth and pretended feelings, and if you should do it with a smile and a song in your heart, how much more of yourself have you lost? I can't agree that the principal of self negation is a helpful one. And how many people used to doing wrong over and over again, quick to hurt have seized on mandatory forgiveness to keep on being horrible people? How many Christian prists and pastors have gone on about it while philandering behind the backs of their spouses, and molesting children? There is nothing more mishandled and wicked in Chrisitanity than the principal of mandatory forgiveness.