Here are two questions I’ve asked myself all through my adult life. My ministry as a priest was founded on them.
Was Jesus an ordinary, fully human being, just like you and me?
Were the disciples, the followers of Jesus, the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, ordinary, fully human beings, just like you and me?
My assumption as a reasonably functional human being was that every person I encountered in my ministry was in essence the same as me – different personality and upbringing and psychological and emotional profile but the same physical essence as me. I also assumed that people who feature in the Gospels are also the same as you and me. That’s why there stories are relevant to us and can be used in sermons and teaching to make relevant comparisons, like with like. The way they behaved and reacted to events were the same as the way members of the congregation and the people living in the parish behave and react to life. This way of looking at the Gospels seemed to be confirmed by the way theologians like, to take just one example, Harry Williams looked at things.
One of the problems I come up against repeatedly on Thinking Anglicans is that the comment threads are a record of the disagreements between people whose staring point is somewhat similar to mine and those people who have an entirely different view of, in particular, the disciples and followers of Jesus and of Jesus himself. Jesus was the Son of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, in a way that made him entirely different from you and me and the disciples and followers also had gifts and behavioural characteristics that made them significantly different from you and me. The impossibility of reconciling differences in teaching and attitudes to gender and sexuality is a result of this difference, a difference that is essentially a gulf.
My life has always been a work in progress. I’ve been making up my theology and spirituality and working model of the Christian life as I’ve gone along, my key point of reference being the Bible. This week, the death of Colin Murray Parkes on 13 January 2024 aged 95 triggered a new level of reflection about the differences and similarities between me and Jesus and the people we meet in the Gospels
The joy of love and the pain of grief
Colin Murray Parkes was a psychiatrist, one of the world’s leading experts on bereavement. His obituary in the Guardian on Wednesday recalled that the Queen used a phrase of his in her message of condolence to those affected by the 9/11 attacks in the USA:
“The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love.”
The biggest problem, said Parkes, was making real to bereaved families after 9/11 the unimaginable horror that their loved one was never going to come back.
“Bereaved people can make it real, but it does take a long time. They have to go over it again and again, and think their way through it. One of the most awful things about bereavement is that the world goes on as if nothing has happened. For bereaved people the world is never going to be the same again.”
Resurrection
We are taught that the resurrection was the event, the experience that gave birth to the Church. It was (and is) the primary experience of Christians, the essence of our faith. The wisdom of Colin Murray Parkes got me thinking about the reaction of Jesus’ followers to the resurrection appearances three days after his death. The stories tell us how they were transformed by his post-resurrection appearances. This is the miracle of the resurrection; that after three days His promise was fulfilled – he was alive again; a resurrected body that could eat and drink and show wounds, could appear in the garden by the tomb, in rooms in Jerusalem and by the lakeshore where he cooked fish.
The resurrection narratives, recounting what happened after Jesus’ brutal, violent crucifixion, short-circuit Parkes’ wisdom that it takes a long time for bereaved people to make real the unimaginable horror that their loved one is never going to come back. “They have to go over it again and again, and think their way through it,” he says. But Mary of Magdala and the other Mary, the eleven at table, the two on their way to Emmaus, the eleven and the rest assembled in Jerusalem, the disciples gathered behind locked doors, without and then with Thomas, and gathered by the sea of Tiberias, Simon Peter, Thomas the Twin, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee and two other disciples and the disciple whom Jesus loved, all seem to have reacted emotionally to their bereavement in a dramatically different way from that described by Parkes. Overcoming their emotions following their traumatic experience of the death by crucifixion of their teacher and Master, who we may assume they thought was dead and never going to come back, they seemed to recover swiftly from their grief when he appeared on the first Easter day and those following days. They had only the briefest period in which to go over what had happened “again and again, and think their way through it.”
The accounts of the resurrection are not, of course, eye witness accounts recorded at the time. The account in each Gospel is different, substantially different. We might speculate that the accounts condense into the shortest of periods, barely three days, the recovery from grief and loss of his followers. The timescale and the processing of emotions may in reality have taken far longer. Over time and in the processing of their experience, their emotions changed. “The most awful thing” had happened but the world around them went on “as if nothing has happened.” They were bereaved people for whom the world was never going to be the same again, as Parkes said.
Dealing with the loss of someone we have known well and whom we loved dearly can be incredibly painful, the deepest pain that comes from loving so much. It would be surprising if Jesus’ closest followers weren’t affected in the same way. The problem for me with the condensed timescale of the Gospel records is that there is no time for them to have processed their emotions, their healthy, normal human reaction to the loss of this most precious of friends.
Holy Week
We have just begin the season of Lent leading to the drama of Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and the celebration of the resurrection on Easter Day. In a period of thirty-six hours at the end of Lent we are invited to live through the extreme heights and depths of emotional experience. But the two nights from death on Good Friday to new life on Easter Day are not a long enough period to process the experience of grief and loss and the pain of death. We know the next step in the story all too well. The liturgical drama has an effect on us, but the death isn’t serious – we know what’s going to happen on Easter day.
Colin Murray Parkes’ suggested there are four stages of grief are: numbness; pining; disorganisation and despair; and then recovery. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross developed this into a model of five stages of grief, five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I turn the Gospels to see what emotions are recorded. In Matthew 28, fear is a recurrent emotion, though the women hurry away in awe and great joy. In Mark also, they run, trembling with amazement and fear. In John, Mary of Magdala stands outside the tomb weeping. In Luke they are terrified. The two disciples on their way to Emmaus are arguing, full of sadness. Later, they realise that as they talked, their hearts were on fire. The assembled company in Jerusalem were startled and terrified, thinking they were seeing a ghost, incredulous and astounded for it seemed too good to be true.
The condensation of time and experience
I think the condensation of time and experience in the gospels diminishes the normal human pain of intense grief at the loss of someone we loved so much. This has a very unfortunate effect. We are given to understand that a miraculous event has occurred. Before the friends and followers of Jesus have had time to process what happened, let alone begin to engage in the four or five stages of grief identified, resurrection joy triumphs. On Easter day, Jesus has risen and the future beckons. Resurrection becomes for us, if we are not careful, what David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, warned us against – that the resurrection is not just a conjuring trick with bones. But the time-condensed account in the gospels give us exactly this; God performing magic.
Declining human competence
Yesterday I found myself asking why is there such incompetence at the top level in the Church of England at the moment by the Archbishops’ Council, the General Secretary, in theology, in safeguarding and in the management of progress towards equality for all, including women and LGBTQIA+ people. Some of us seem to be less and less able to perform like competent adults in the various areas of life for which we are responsible. At the same time, competent human beings are running things and progress is being made in science and technology. Individuals take responsibility, performing well and act competently at work and at home and in friendships and relationships. I want to ask; has God proved to be really competent at his task of communicating love? Are the tensions in the Church, tensions there from the founding of the Church, are they due to God’s incompetence, his inadequate communication of the rules, or is it we who are responsible, is it our incompetence in interpreting them? Of course, original sin is the answer to that question.
I use the mantra “God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love” a lot, but Colin Murray Parkes’ obituary reminds me that pain and grief are integral to love, the price we pay for love, and perhaps my mantra fails to acknowledge the pain of love. I’ve learnt to short circuit the process, to jump too hastily from Good Friday to Easter Day. Death on a cross is the price paid for demonstrating what unconditional love is, and what the inevitable counterpart to love is; the pain of misunderstanding, betrayal, loss, death and grief. The tensions within the Church of framing theology and teaching about human lives and relationships are echoed in Jesus’ tensions and misunderstandings with his family, the religious leaders, his disciples, and his insecurities with his Father as painful death approached. When the Church endows Jesus with a divine nature and magical powers and his followers with spiritual powers way beyond anything we are capable of, the result is fantasy faith, the belief that God has and will intervene to short-circuit human emotions and experience. That’s where conflict in the faith of the Church of England resides today.
The shadow side of unconditional, infinite, intimate love is the pain of grief and loss, the ending of relationships, the price we pay for falling in love. The idealised resurrection narratives in the Gospels, the transformation of experience after three days, are unbelievable. Where is the anger and the gaping, painful void of loss? The Christian system deals with this superficially at the moment, devising a version of the faith designed above all to be attractive and successful at drawing in converts. But it isn’t dealing with the permanent sense of anxiety and anger I feel all the time in my body system, observing how as a race, we Homo sapiens failing to deal with systemic, global manifestations of bereavement and loss.