Tag: Russia

Righteousness rights wrongs

David Herbert3 Comments

Not for ever in green pastures …….

This simple reflection for the 2nd Sunday in Lent (B) is for a small group who gather once a month for worship following the Book of Common Prayer. Hymn singing is not part of what they do, except today when the focus is on the hymn Father, hear the prayer we offer as a way of a simple exploration of Jesus’s way of suffering in Mark 8:31-end.

We have prayed this morning:

Almighty God,
you show to those who are in error the light of your truth,
that they may return to the way of righteousness:
grant to all those who are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion,
that they may reject those things that are contrary to their profession,
and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same

We have prayed to God who shows to those in error the light of his truth that they may walk in the way of righteousness. God wants his people to walk the way of righteousness, and he gives us the means to do that.

What is the way of righteousness?

Righteousness is the translation of the Greek word in the New Testament which gives us also the word justice. In other words, that Greek word, is translated in two different ways: righteousness and justice – and can be summed up in the word rectification. So the way of righteousness is the way of rectification, the way of setting right what is wrong, the way of rectifying what is unjust. It is the way of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Another word we use is salvation. We, alongside many others, including many non-Christians lovingly long for this rectification and salvation.

And we know it’s not an easy way.

A song from the heart of the church is Father, hear the prayer we offer.
Father, hear the prayer we offer, not for ease that prayer shall be, but for strength that we may ever live our lives courageously.

In today’s gospel Peter again gets it wrong. Jesus was talking openly about how the Son of Man had to undergo great suffering, be reject and be killed, and Peter took him aside to rebuke Jesus about this. To which Jesus said to him what he’d already said to the tempter in the wilderness – “Get behind me Satan”. Peter was suggesting an easier way for Jesus. Father hear the prayer we offer, not for ease that prayer shall be.

We went to see the film about Nicholas Winton this week – One Life. He was a stockbroker who in 1938 went to Prague to witness the plight of refugees there – people fleeing for their lives. He took an enormous risk going there. His mother didn’t want him to go. She knew how dangerous it was. She wanted an easier way for her son. But he insisted, “I have to go”.

He was horrified by what he found in Prague and immediately set about finding a way to rescue some of them. It was the plight of the children which most affected him. He didn’t know how he was going to be able to help them – nor did those who were with him. He just knew that he had to find a way – a way that would need visas, foster homes and money. Gradually he found the way and organised the trains that would rescue 669 children.

Father, hear the prayer we offer:

Not for ever in green pastures do we ask our way to be, but the steep and rugged pathway may we tread rejoicingly.

Esther Rantzen’s programme, That’s Life, featured his story. They invited him as a guest and in great appreciation surprised him with an audience made up of the children he had saved back in 1938. The final credits of the film One Life suggested that over 6000 people owed their life to him – taking account of the families the children he rescued went on to have. He never talked about his work. His wife only discovered what he had done when she found a scrapbook in their home many years later.

He is remembered in Israel and named as one of The Righteous among the Nations – they are non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. He is one of the righteous who followed the way of righteousness, righting wrongs in his small ways, the only ways he could.

We have heard a lot this week about the former leader of opposition to Vladimir Putin. Alexei Navalny died in his cell in his prison inside the Arctic Circle – most likely he was killed. Alexei Navalny was a Christian. The Beatitudes were his inspiration. He called them his instruction book. He was particularly inspired by the blessing on those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. That is what he did. He hungered and thirsted after righteousness, all the while knowing the risks he was running, undergoing great suffering, getting rejected, and finally being killed ….

We don’t live with the same extremes as Alexei Navalny. We are not victims of Russian imperialism, nor are we Jews facing persecution and extermination, nor are we living in Jesus’ context in Israel, where their life wasn’t their own because of the Roman occupation and the cruelty that went along with that.

We could say that we live in quieter times in this rural setting of Warwickshire – but Christian prayer isn’t about having an easy time. There is a temptation to turn our backs on the suffering world, and we can do that because we might have built up protections. It is a temptation – to turn our back, to close our eyes and to not engage our hearts and minds. We have to resist the temptation to turn our back, to turn away from trouble, and instead we need to turn to face the realities of life and engage with the suffering of those who are the victims of wrongdoing. This is the way of righteousness – making things right, righting wrongs in our own small ways.

Father, hear the prayer we offer:
Not for ever, by still waters, would we idly rest and stay.

There are two ways we can go. We can go the way of the tempter, or we can go the way of Jesus. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” That’s the way of righteousness. It’s the harder way and the way that those who love us may prefer us not to follow.

Mark 8:31 – end

Then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’

PS I am grateful for Fleming Rutledge’s work. She is the one who has pointed out the meaning of righteousness as rectification in her book The Crucifixion.

Notes heard above The Noise of Time

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The Noise of TimeI don’t read that much but every now and then I come across something that takes my breath away. Julian Barnes, through his book The Noise of Time, has me intrigued with the noise of time. This is a poetic book that is well crafted and beautifully composed. It tells us the time and the time is telling. It is a short book in which a lot of time is told in a short time. It is a time of terror.

I read this book for the first time at the end of Holy Week, through the three days known as the TriDuum, Maundy Thursday through till Holy Saturday – the short time it took to tell so much of time. I was attentive to the noises of that other time told through three days: the crushing noise of religious and political authority almost overpowering a more faithful and resilient strain.

There are three main characters in The Noise of Time. There’s the “author” who is the one who remembers. There’s Shostakovich, who is the one who hears. And there is the one less than human, Power deformed. Arguably there is a cast of three in the Triduum. There’s the one who remembers (the witnesses), the one who hears (on the cross) and the ones Power deformed (who know not what they do).

Running through my mind while I read this book were lines from a poem by Anna Lightart called The Second Music:

Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other

lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.

The Noise of Time is a book full of threes – if you like, there are three hands: an hour hand, minute hand and second hand. The three chapters measure three movements: On the Landing, On the Plane and In the Car. 

There are three brands of cigarettes (Kazbeks, Belamors, Herzegovinas). There are three vodka glasses for three vodka drinkers (the perfect number for vodka drinking). There are three wives (Nina, Margarita and Irina). There are three ways to destroy your soul: “by what others did to you, by what others made you do to yourself, and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself”. (p.181)

There are three Conversations with Power and there are three leap years twelve years apart from each other (1936, 1948 and 1960). This is the time frame of a crushing history. It is a history which crushes the human spirit and twists arts and artists to the ends of empire, turning them into cowards – which threatened to be a life’s work (being a coward, just to survive).

“It was not easy being a coward. Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment – when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and with yourself as well. To be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn’t ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your fallen, abject character. Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change – which made it, in a way, a kind of courage. He smiled to himself and lit another cigarette. The pleasures of irony had not yet deserted him.” (p.171)

Dimitiri Shostakovich was one of the major composers of the twentieth century. I’m no musician but I do know that there are usually four movements to a symphony. That is music’s shape. In his threes, is Barnes describing the way in which totalitarianism deforms truth and beauty? There is the hint of a fourth movement in the opening and closing of the book in epigraph and coda. In these there are the three characters on stage (it’s a station platform). There’s one who remembers, there’s one who hears and there’s one who is a vulgar “half man” (reduced by the noise of time to being less than himself, a mere “technique of survival”. The one who remembered, remembers the vodka and remembers how the one who heard pricked up his ears as he heard the notes of the clinking vodka glasses.

This is what was remembered:

“They were in the middle of Russia, in the middle of a war, in the middle of all kinds of suffering within that war. There was a long station platform, on which the sun had just come up. There was a man, half a man really, wheeling himself along on a trolley, attached to it by a rope threaded through the top of his trousers. The two passengers had a bottle of vodka. They descended from the train. The beggar stopped singing his filthy song. Dimitri Dmitrievich held the bottle, he the glasses. Dimitri Dmitrievich poured vodka into each glass …

He was no barman, and the level of vodka in each glass was slightly different …

But Dimitri Dmitrievich was listening , and hearing as he always did. So when the three glasses with their different levels came together in a single chink, he had smiled, and put his head on one side so that the sunlight flashed briefly off his spectacles, and murmured, “A triad”.

And that was what the one who remembered had remembered. War, fear, poverty, typhus and filth, yet in the middle of it, above it and beneath it and through it all, Dimitri Dmitrievich had heard a perfect triad… a triad put together by three not very clean vodka glasses and their contents was a sound that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.” (p.196)

So the tragedy is told in The Noise of Time. There is a lot of time told in a short time. In one moment there is a note of beauty, a sound of music ringing above the noise of time, testimony to the human spirit, crushed, humiliated for so much of the time. There is the sounding of hope.

“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.” (p.97)