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A Theology of Compassion
a Professional Development component for the
Chaplains |
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If the first question that Rowan Williams’ understanding of the Gospel puts to us is ‘What difference does it make to my self-understanding if I believe myself to be held in a loving, accepting gaze?’, the second question is, ‘What difference does it make to our understanding of how we might live together if we believe that each of us is held in the same loving regard?’ [19]
The Gospel is a message of disarming acceptance, a message of crucifying love. But who is it that accepts us? Who is it that loves us? After all, the Gospel is not, for Williams, a self‑help mantra that we repeat to ourselves in the mirror every morning, a message that we create and control, and can modify to suit our felt needs. Nor is it a message about a generalized, abstract idea of love, distilled on a laboratory bench or in a theologian's study. It is not the message that we are loved by nobody in particular, or that we can and should love ourselves. It is a message from beyond us; it is a message that we hear but do not own, a message which always retains the power to challenge and upset our understanding of it; it is a message that has a particular shape which we do not control, and which we must painstakingly learn. But where or who does it come from? [21]
Jesus, who had been betrayed, handed over, tortured, and crucified, returned to his betrayers and his torturers, still bearing the marks of their betrayal and their violence, still as the crucified one, and once again stepped over the barrier that their rejection and abandonment had created between themselves and him – and offered them his love, his acceptance. He, their victim, offered them forgiveness and the possibility of transformation, creating with them a community of forgiven people. The resurrection, says Williams, creates forgiven persons, in a community of the forgiven. [22]
Christian talk of incarnation directs our whole attention to the whole shape of Jesus’ life; it is Jesus’ whole life that is the Word of God. This fully human life, lived in a particular time and place, among a particular group of people, is God’s word of acceptance and judgement for us; this messy, complex, finite, bounded reality, a life lived jostled by disciples, crowds, opponents – a life lived towards and on the cross – is God’s face turned towards us. [30]
The disciples, and all Christians, become carriers of the acceptance and the judgement that they have encountered in Jesus, not as people who live fully the gracious acceptance he has demonstrated (we remain ambiguous, conflictual, more Esau than Jesus) nor as people who grasp fully the message they bear, but as those who point continually away from themselves and towards the living one whom they trust. The righteousness which Christians take out into the world is Christ’s, not their own. [32f.]
To think of God as anything like an isolated individual who decides to come into relationship is to betray the Gospel – it is to reserve some part or aspect of God’s being from the Gospel, to say that there is some territory in God which is not thoroughly caught up in the Gospel. [43]
There is always more of God; God is always breaking out of the conceptual boxes into which we have placed him. We cannot predict where the journey into knowledge of God’s love will take us. Williams finds something like this proclaimed in the resurrection, drawing a parallel between the stories of the empty tomb, and the stories of the empty space between the cherubim on the top of the ark of the covenant in the Old Testament. The latter functioned as a constant reminder to Israel that their God was an uncontrollable and inexhaustible presence. The empty tomb, Williams suggests, does something similar for us: it prevents us from thinking that Jesus’ identity and work is finished and receding into the past; it prevents us from thinking that we have done with it and can move on to new things or supposedly deeper levels of spirituality. The Jesus who is represented by the empty tomb is a Jesus who has a continued, uncontrollable, and inexhaustible presence; the Jesus represented by the empty tomb cannot be controlled or tied down or finished with. [49]
[T]he temptation … is to think that this warning applies to other people, to people who have not heard the Gospel, perhaps, or people who perversely cling to a theology less pure than ours. They are the ones who need to hear this; we, of course, have ears to hear … No doubt the High Priest and his court, who knew their Scriptures well and prayed and worshipped often, would have said something similar. Yet for us, as for them, to defend ourselves in this way from Jesus’ challenge is already for our voices to slip into the old accents of ‘the insane world’; it is to close our ears to God’s shattering judgement. [53]
The Gospel is not a message that we can tell ourselves – it is not the sort of message that can be derived from a little introspection or analysis: we need to hear it, to be won into it – to be taught it. [61]
Williams suggests that we have developed many ways of avoiding Scripture – many ways of refusing to listen to it, ways of refusing to pay attention to the witness it provides to something intractably historical. There are obvious and overt ways in which this takes place, but there are also more subtle ways: Williams argues, for instance, that all too often we rush to substitute our unifying, systematizing, harmonizing readings or summaries of the text for the text itself – stepping away from the kind of historical learning to which this Gospel calls us, to something quicker, easier and more controllable. [63]
“If we had to choose between a Church tolerably confident of what it has to say and seeking only for effective means of saying it, and a Church constantly engaged in an internal dialogue and critique of itself, and exploration to discover what is central to its being, I should say that it is the latter which is the more authentic.” Rather than thinking of the Church as the bearer of answers, it might be better to think about the Church as the bearer of a question – the bearer of the question which the Gospel poses; we might say with Williams that the Church is ‘[t]hat which transmits God’s question from generation to generation’. [69]
‘[T]he great mark of discipleship to the risen Christ is, as the New Testament has it, that we eat and drink with him after his resurrection.’ This is a gift which sets no preconditions. It is given to the faithful and faithless alike, and is given again and again and again despite the deepest failures and betrayals – and so it is a gift that demands everything of us. [73]
Heresy is any drastic deduction in the capaciousness of Christian language – the resource which it provides for making sense, and for asking questions, in any and every situation. It is any too strong culling of orthodoxy’s rich and diverse ‘doctrinal ecology’, ‘a variety of theological discourse wide enough to communicate the full and disorienting significance of the generative theological experience’. [83]
Jesus calls us to share his life, and the life which he shares with us is a life of self-giving. If we are drawn into this life of self-giving, then it will be by ourselves becoming self-givers – and that means that our selves will become gifts – gifts to God, and gifts to each other. To put it another way, we could say that to be drawn into the life of Christ is to become those who pass on that life, by embodying that life in our own distinctive ways: the medium of the giving is our own lives; what we give is a reflection of the life of Christ in our particular circumstances – the life that emerges when his whole life is brought to bear on each of our whole lives. We become those whose lives give God’s life – and that is what it means to be Church. [84f.]
The call to adulthood is not a call to isolation, but a call to become unreservedly a giver and a receiver – to be caught up totally into the economy of giving. ‘[T]he resurrection gospel’, Williams says, ‘speaks of the proper expectation – the right – of all men and women to responsible identity, the capacity to be self-aware agents empowered to take active part I the “net of exchange”’ – the ‘net’ of giving and receiving. In different words … it is a divine call, an invitation to become fully ‘personal’, where ‘personal’ means something like ‘constituted by what we receive from others and by what we give in return’. In still other words, it is a call to the life of the spirit. ‘[F]lesh’, as St. Paul uses the term, is … a word that describes human life minus relationship. Or perhaps … human life that is not properly inhabited. Flesh is human life somehow alienated, cut off from its environment, cut off from the life of spirit which in St. Paul’s usage is always about relation … The gift of the spirit in St. Paul’s theology is a gift that always brings relation. And the life of the spirit, as opposed to the life of the flesh, is life in free relation to God and generous relation to one another. [90f.]
Our ability to act is a result of our having learnt a language through which we can respond to the world, a language which shapes our responsiveness, giving it more or less discrimination, more or less resilience. Our ability to act therefore depends upon what we have received, depends upon others having acted upon us. We act by means of the gifts we have been given. [94]
The Gospel calls us to recognize ‘the breakdown of performance and the emptiness of gratification’. [95]
The forgiveness, the acceptance, which meets us in the Gospel is one which sees all this mess that we are in – all this mess that we are – and sees what it can become, how it can be transformed, how it can be made to shine. What we are given by God’s acceptance is ‘hope, the apprehension of present truth, present reality as infinitely open to the transfiguring and glorifying action of God’. Williams’ central biblical example for all this is Simon Peter’s encounter with the risen Jesus in Galilee. Having betrayed Jesus three times, he is deliberately reminded by Jesus of his betrayal. … Jesus invites Peter to discover that his betrayal has not broken the call which God has for him. He is invited to discover that Jesus ‘accepts, forgives, bears and absolves the hurt done’, and that he can take Peter the betrayer and make him the feeder of his sheep. What Peter receives is not ‘innocence’ – the pretence that his betrayal did not happen – but transfiguring grace. [98f.]
Mike Higton, Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams |
Discussion
1 – What difference does it make to our understanding