Talitha Cumi: A reflection on the healing of the daughter of Jairus

“And, behold, there came a man named Jairus, and he was a ruler of the synagogue: and he fell down at Jesus' feet, and besought him that he would come into his house: For he had one only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she lay a dying. But as he went the people thronged him. And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any, Came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: and immediately her issue of blood stanched. And Jesus said, Who touched me? When all denied, Peter and they that were with him said, Master, the multitude throng thee and press thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me? And Jesus said, Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. And when the woman saw that she was not hid, she came trembling, and falling down before him, she declared unto him before all the people for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed immediately.And he said unto her, Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace. While he yet spake, there cometh one from the ruler of the synagogue's house, saying to him, Thy daughter is dead; trouble not the Master. But when Jesus heard it, he answered him, saying, Fear not: believe only, and she shall be made whole. And when he came into the house, he suffered no man to go in, save Peter, and James, and John, and the father and the mother of the maiden. And all wept, and bewailed her: but he said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead. And he put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway: and he commanded to give her meat.”
This passage from St. Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 8 (also found in St. Mark and St. Matthew) is one of the most powerful, and most compelling, in the Gospels. I heard it read a few weeks ago, and have been planning a reflection on it in the weeks since- it has been a busy fieldwork season though, and I’ve only now had time. There is a lot we can learn from this episode in the life of Jesus (which, like the Gospels in general, I would accept as historical and truthful). Three things, though, especially stand out to me. This passage is important because of what it tells us about the reality of miracles, about the nature of love, and about the mystery of the Incarnation.
This passage purports to be nothing other than it is: a truthful and accurate account of two miracles, a miracle of healing and a miracle of raising the dead. The story makes that plain. To a lot of modern people, of course, including to some Christians, miracles are outmoded and embarrassing, something to be explained away. As enlightened people of today, we know that miracles don’t happen. They can’t happen for three reasons. The laws of nature dictate that when death happens, the chemical changes and loss of thermodynamic order that immediately begin to take place are completely irreversible. And the laws of nature are absolutely unbreakable, if not they wouldn’t be laws, and modern science and technology couldn’t exist. Furthermore even if we grant that the laws of nature are not totally unbreakable, no one has ever credibly seen a miracle, and all the experience of humanity is that when we are dead, we are dead for ever. That was Hume’s argument against miracles, and it is as strong today as it ever was. Right?
Wrong. I don’t have too much space here to explain why it’s wrong, and arguing with agnostic materialists is really the least interesting part of this essay, so I’ll say just a few words as to why strict materialists (those who deny the existence of anything supernatural, including miracles) are wrong. No less a scientist then Alfred Russell Wallace, the codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, argued incisively in an essay that I’m currently reading, that Hume was full of sh*t. The laws of nature tell us how natural systems behave to the extent that they are self-contained. Conservation of energy and momentum, for example, can tell us how a ball will move around a pool table once we strike it. But they can’t take into account some joker passing by, picking up the ball, and placing it his pocket. The laws of nature work- infallibly and to the last decimal place- when natural systems are left to themselves. And almost always, they are. But not quite always. The existence of laws of nature- the fact that this universe is an orderly place, governed by laws of physics and chemistry that the mind of man can understand- is in itself evidence that there is something outside the physical universe. For you can’t have law without a lawgiver. Something must have caused the rational, explicable universe we live in that natural science has had so much success at explaining- some Person or set of Personal beings. And if that lawgiver is outside the universe, he isn’t bound by its laws, and can temporarily override them- in very rare instances, of course, for it is God’s nature to be orderly and discreet- but in important instances nonetheless. Like this one.
The tendency towards thermodynamic equilibrium that characterizes all systems- and that, in particular, describes what happens to us after we die, as we equilibrate with our environment- is a statistical law. As we know, chemical reactions are described in statistical terms: it’s not _impossible_ that, say, an iodide ion and a methanol molecule will react to produce methyl iodide and hydroxide: it’s just very, very, improbable and unlikely (such that only a tiny percentage of such products will be formed). But isn’t in the nature of God that He can make the improbable happen? God cannot overcome the laws of logic, He cannot make a sixth regular solid, or make a stone so heavy He cannot lift it, or calculate the last digit of the number e. But inasmuch as the laws of nature are more matters of probability than of logic- and this is true of most of them- He can intervene to override or reverse them. Science can never say that such rare, inexplicable, miraculous events don’t occur- it can only say that they are not part of science, and that science can have nothing to say about them, and can only be carried out during the 99% of the time that miracles don’t happen. The existence of miracles doesn’t contravene ‘science’ any more than the fact that we breed domestic animals contravenes the process of evolution, or any more than the existence of powered flight contravenes the law of gravity, or any more than the existence of electrolysis contravenes the fact that hydrogen and oxygen react “irreversibly” to produce water. Miracles are a temporary suspension of natural laws, not the denial of their existence.
That’s enough about miracles- read Wallace’s essay for more, including where he trenchantly said (I paraphrase) that if we were all as skeptical as Hume, we would never have credited the first man to describe a flying fish or a platypus: “Such a simple fact as the existence of flying fish could never be proved, if Hume's argument is a good one; for the first man who saw and described one, would have the universal experience against him that fish do not fly, or make any approach to flying, and his evidence being rejected, the same argument would apply to the second, and to every subsequent witness, and thus no man at the present day who has not seen a flying fish ought to believe that such things exist.” As the great book “Life of Pi” says, “Life is hard to believe, ask any biologist. Love is hard to believe, ask any lover.” Never deny something just because it seems unlikely. This story is an example of a miracle- two actually. The Gospels tell us- credibly, I think- that Christ performed many healing miracles. But He only performed miracles of raising the dead rarely, most notably with Lazarus. In both cases people who were recently dead. These were not corpses that had rotted away and disintegrated. God never carries out those kind of miracles- bringing back disembodied spirits, or half-disintegrated dead bodies. Those things _would_ actually be violations of nature, contraventions of the world the Lord has made; they would represent some alien power invading nature, not the coming home of the rightful sovereign of our earth. Whatever the return of Samuel represented it certainly wasn’t the power of God: “And Saul perceived that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and prostrated himself” (1 Samuel 28:14). Christ brought back- twice, only twice- the souls of two people who had just passed away, at a moment when their bodies were still in good condition. The Acts of Thomas, describing the life of Thomas the Apostle after he went to India, suggest that he did the same, bringing back to life a girl who had just been killed by her lover out of misguided religious sentiment. “And immediately, as he drew her hand, she sprang up, and sat, looking at the great multitude standing round.” The fact that these miracles happened only on a handful of occasions, under very specific circumstances, lends them an air of plausibility, once we acknowledge the possibility of very rare instances in which a supernatural power overcomes the laws of nature. But that’s all I will say: I’m less interested in arguing that miracles are possible than in understanding why they are important.
Why did Christ heal the daughter of Jairus? To ask that is to answer the question itself. Christ healed because He loved us, and because He could not bear to see people suffer. He looked on death, and was overcome by sympathy for its victims, and He wept. “They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Now Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!” (John 11:34-36). We are told that even when He was being led to His execution, He felt pity less for himself than for the city of Jerusalem whose end He foretold forty years before it happened: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children” (Luke 23:28). He didn’t do it for show, or to make people overawed at his power. In fact he specifically overcame the temptation to do just that: “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone” (Luke 4:9-11). He tried, in fact, to downplay the miracle saying, “She is not dead but sleepeth”. He did it because He loved us, and because He had sympathy for our suffering and pity for our weakness. He could not, when asked, turn away those who truly sought him. And neither will he turn away anyone who seeks him: neither in this life, nor in the next. Whether they be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Mandaean, Zoroastrian, even atheist or agnostic: all will, someday, find that which they truly seek, whether or not they know Him by name. As it is said: “To whoever asks, it will be opened.”
I haven’t even got to the most interesting question that this story raises in my mind, which is the question asked by Christ: “Who touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out of me.” Christ being God, does this mean he never asked a question to which He didn’t know the answer? Was He just kidding around when he asked this question- was it just rhetorical? I don’t think so- Christ was many things but He wasn’t ever a joker. And after some recent free-time reading I feel even more strongly that way- and hopefully I’ll explain why in a future blog post. But that is another story, for another time.
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”

A (late) Ascension Thursday reflection

Well, I meant to post this about two and a half weeks ago, on Ascension Thursday. But I had a lot of work, and wasn’t able to. Better late than never, I suppose.

Ascension Thursday is the day, by tradition 40 days after Easter (though some apocryphal sources claim it actually happened 18 months later) when Christ ascended into heaven, borne upward to heaven on a cloud: “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9). There’s much to say, of course, about the meaning of the Ascension. Why did he choose to ascend to heaven and leave us behind on earth? Why didn’t He tell his followers when he would return? Why did he choose to leave us to our own devices? But rather than try and think about what the Ascension means, I’d like to take a more mystical approach, and to try to imagine in my mind’s eye what it must have been like. Because some things can’t be explained by words, but only by imagination and experience.

I lived for almost three years in a village on the west coast of Madagascar. This was a dryland region, with an average of 800 mm of rain a year, and in some years (like the second I was there) much less: it was not uncommon to have parched, unforgiving years with very little rain, in which those people unfortunate enough not to have access to a river or a rice paddy would look on their fields with agonized dismay as they saw the corn shrivel up and die, and the sweet potatoes they planted produce only tiny slivers of roots. Rain did fall that year, thank God, but not much of it; it was a year of hunger, of suffering, and despair (though worse in the far South than in the West; we at least were spared an actual famine). Living in a dryland part of the world like western Madagascar, where a day’s storm could make the difference between survival and starvation, one learns to look at the clouds every morning, hoping to see in them a sign that this day will bring life-giving rain. People in my village dwelt obsessively on the weather, and on the state of the clouds every day, and on how likely it looked that there would be rain. Living there, I also became trained to look up at the sky every morning and hope for clouds. We in the West tend to forget the importance and mystery of the clouds, especially as they must have appeared to people in a premodern, dryland culture like first century Palestine.

The Apostles, I’m sure, were as enthralled by clouds as people in my village. I’m sure as they stood ‘gazing into heaven as he went’ (Acts 1:10), they were doing something they were accustomed to do every day. But this time the clouds were something special, for they carried within them the incarnate God. What was it like for them? Take a few minutes and sit back and close your eyes, or if you choose look upwards at the sky. Try to imagine what it must have looked like, and try to imagine yourself there, at that scene, sometime shortly after the first Easter. Let every sensory stimulus you experience now fade into the background, and imagine yourself as part of that crowd. In my mind’s eye I imagine them staring upwards, and realizing for the first time the beauty of this earth for which Christ had died.. I see the group of them standing there, and above them the clouds drifting. Maybe it was a blue, rainless day, with only a few clouds scattered high above, alone and isolated like islands in the vast blue ocean, rocks in the sea gladdening the hearts of exploring sailors; maybe it was an overcast day, with the blue of the sky replaced and blocked out by a grayish-white dome that stretched from horizon to horizon. Maybe it was a day when the winds were blowing strongly and steadily, and the clouds drifted across the sky like ships crossing the ocean, like the ships that would one day carry the Austronesians and the Europeans all over the earth’s surface.

Maybe it was one of those days with feathery clouds, that spread out at their edges like fingers, so ethereal and insubstantial that they seem to gradually fade into the sky around them, drifting and swirling, dissolving and reforming. Like the fronds of an aquatic plant, or the tentacles of a sea anemone, slender and sinuous. Maybe it was one of those days when you can see colors in the clouds: whiter above, darker beneath, and where you can see regular ripples, heavy black clouds alternating with thinner, lighter, white areas of cloud, so that it looks like you’re looking upward at the heavy scales on the stomach of some giant snake. Perhaps this was how the myth originated, common in the time of Christ (it is referenced in the traditions about St. Thomas the Apostle, e.g. “I am son of him that girds the world about” in the Acts of Thomas), that the world is girded around by a huge snake.

Maybe it was one of those days where the clouds are thicker in some areas and thinner in others, where you can almost see through the cloud layer in places, as if they were windows in a house. Maybe the clouds were twisting and turning in strange and wonderful shapes, appearing in our eyes like dragons spread out across the sky, or like horses, or like eagles. I wonder, sometimes, if this is where we got the idea of dragons.

We are told that he was lifted up by a cloud, and again that he was “carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:51), not that he rose under his own power. That presumes that something carried him up from the ground. But we know that clouds don’t normally float around at ground level. Perhaps, though, there was a mist or fog that surrounded him. And perhaps, veiled in this mist, he slowly began to rise and to fade from their sight, as a bird fades in our sight as it flies away, and gradually merges with the sky. We’ve all walked, ridden our bikes, or driven through thick fog. It’s dangerous, obviously, because it reduces visibility: but like many dangerous things it’s also beautiful. To walk through a thick mist, a fog so thick that water collects on your skin, so thick you can’t see more than fifty yards ahead, and to walk through it like you’re swimming through the ocean, is an experience not to be missed, because it takes the ordinary scenes that we’re accustomed to- the road down which you’re used to walking or taking your bicycle every day- and makes them eerie and unfamiliar. Western Madagascar didn’t have enough rain but it often had mist and I remember taking my bike down the sandy dirt track that constituted the Route Nationale on some very misty mornings. In that mist that enveloped Christ were water droplets suspended in air: two of the substances that we need most urgently to live, and the two basic fluids that make up the environment around us. And by enveloping himself in mist, Christ showed again that He was intimately associated, in love, with the materials of this earth, that he loved not just us, but this whole earth that, though it was now in subjection to a dark and evil “ruler of this world” (John 12:31), still had once owed its origins ultimately to Christ himself: “In Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). He came not just to make us new but to make the earth new: “and I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (Revelation 21:1). Mist, too, is gentle and cooling, especially in a hot place like Palestine: it must have been a perennial source of wonder to the apostles, who didn’t know about suspensions and solutions, how something could be a mixture of liquid and vapor, and how water in the mist could turn to water vapor on your skin. They perhaps saw this as a miracle, whereas we see it as a simple example of condensation, but after all, aren’t the laws of physics themselves something of a miracle?

What time of day was it when the Ascension happened? I like to think that it was three o’clock, the hour that He died. And maybe, just maybe, the apostles stayed till the evening. Maybe they stayed till they could see the sun setting, shining ever more vivid and more colorful the closer it came to sinking below the horizon. The closer it gets to fading away for the night, and leaving us in darkness, the more beautiful and more intense its colors become. Perhaps they were reminded- perhaps St. Peter, the fisherman, was reminded most of all- of the dorado (mahi mahi, as we Americans know it), called lampuki at Malta, which in life carries brilliant golden, green and blue colors, and which in its death throes changes to a dazzling range of bright colors, one after another. And perhaps, most of all, they were reminded of how Christ was more exalted and more acclaimed by the crowd in the moment of his death then he had been through the three years of his ministry, and how it wasn’t till the moment that he breathed his last that the centurion, hireling of a swollen and decadent empire, finally recognized that “truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). It is said that Christ will come again from the east, but I like to think that he disappeared from them in the western sky, such that as they gazed after him they looked into the sun setting on the thirty-odd year period of the Incarnation. As yellow turned to orange, orange to pink, pink to an ever darker and deeper purple, before the light of the sun faded and the light of the stars and moon became the only guide to walk by: through all of that I see the apostles standing there, unable to tear themselves away. Could you have? Having spent three years in the presence of the word made flesh? After that, what more could life offer you? Wouldn’t anything else be an anticlimax? It is implied that among the followers of Christ at this time where ‘the women’, including presumably Mary of Magdala, the one who had, the first time she met Christ, bent down and “wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head” (Luke 8:38). Can you imagine being confronted, in the flesh, with a person that would compel you to such a supreme act of self-surrender? And once you had, could there be anything worse than seeing him leave you, even to be borne on a cloud into heaven?

It’s helpful, I think, to read the apocryphal gospels too; it’s always helpful to remember that what we know as the New Testament was picked from out of many writings about Christ that circulated in the first few centuries. There are just a couple of apocryphal accounts of the Ascension that I’ve been able to find through a quick google search. The ‘Pistis Sophia’, possibly written in the second century, describes a pillar of light descending and enveloping Christ. The “Secret Book of James”, written between 100 and 150 AD and apparently drawing on separate traditions than our four Gospels, describes the Ascension thus: “We heard with our ears and saw with our eyes the noise of wars, a trumpet blast, and great turmoil.” No clouds, here, but apocalyptic imagery. But are these two descriptions contradictory? Maybe not. In the midst of gazing up at the clouds, following the fading Christ with their eyes, the Apostles may have heard and seen fleeting images of the world as it would be when Christ returned, and glimpses of the conflict between good and evil that would only intensify, and have intensified, in the 20 centuries since Christ left us. Maybe they saw images of his return, in which He would appear not as a wandering carpenter but as a multiply crowned king: “His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems” (Revelation 19:12). What has Christ left us to expect on his return? Because perhaps the Apostles saw a little foretaste of His return in those moments that they witnessed his departure. But that’s a different story, for a different time.

Amen.

Reflections on Esther

So yesterday I had a plane ride from Michigan to Boston, and I decided to take the time to catch up on some Bible reading. For no particular reason I decided to look at the book of Esther, which I hadn't read before.

This is about a Jewish girl in Persia during the period of the Persian rule over Israel (the Persians had conquered Israel from the Babylonians, as Isaiah had foretold). After the Persian queen Vashti falls out of favor, Esther wins a beauty contest and becomes the next queen of Persia. She finds out about a plot by the emperor's evil minister Haman to commit genocide against the Jews, and she thwarts the plot and saves her people. It's really a good read. If you do read it, you should read the longer, Catholic/Orthodox version which includes several chapters not included in most Protestant bibles. These chapters are among the best in the book, and their beauty alone indicates that the Catholics, Orthodox and Eastern churches were right to keep them.

People read the Old Testament in different ways. Personally I don't get hung up on which parts of the Old Testament are literal fact: I read it not as a textbook of history, biology, or paleontology, but as an inspired work written by fallible men whose function, for Christians, is to prophecy Christ. I read the Old Testament only in light of the New, for the light that it casts upon the story of Christ. Jonah wasn't really swallowed by 'a big fish', and his story isn't simply a fable about interreligious tolerance, though it is that too: rather it is a remarkable prophecy of Christ. It was with this 'typological' interpretation in mind that I read the book, and was struck by how many remarkable parallels it has with the story of Salome in the Gospels. Salome, of course, used for evil ends the power that Esther used for good.

This parallel came to my mind when I noticed the promise that Xerxes makes to Esther, reminiscent of the promise Herod Antipas makes to Salome: "Ask for anything and I will grant it, even unto the half of my kingdom."The story of Salome, like the story of Esther, shows us the power that sexuality carries with it, and the power that love has to rule over the actions of men. As Rousseau acknowledges in the 'Discource on the Origins of Inequality", even in a communistic state where men no longer have wealth and resources to fight over, they will still fight over love. Salome, like Esther, was a woman of great beauty who used her beauty to advantage. But the difference, of course, is that while Esther used her power to bring life, and to succour the suffering, Salome used hers to bring death. The true God is a god of life, who made himself incarnate "that they might have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). The evil power, whatever name we call him by, is a power who loves death.

Here is another difference. Xerxes truly loved his queen, and physical attraction was intermixed with tenderness and affection. When she approaches him with fear and trembling, he responds with gentle kindness: "And the queen faltered, and turned pale and faint, and collapsed upon the head of the maid who went before her. Then God changed the spirit of the king to gentleness, and in alarm he sprang from the throne and took her in his arms until she came to herself. And he comforted her with soothing words..." (Esther 15:7-8). Few things lead us to feel tenderness and solicitude more than to see the vulnerability and tenderness of those who suffer. The sight of anyone who suffers- a crying baby, a fearful child, a forlorn adult man or woman crushed by poverty, sickness, or oppression- leads us out of ourselves, into empathy and sympathy. And to be brought out of ourselves is the beinning of virtue, and wisdom. In this way God brings good out of evil: "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but [he was born blind] that the works of God might be made manifest in him" (John 9:3). How many of us have been asked for food, or for money, by an adult and been overcome by cynicism, but then when we see that they have a hungry child with them have changed our mind? Again, "Though he will not get up and give him anything because he is is friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise up and give him what he needs" (Luke 11:8). This is one reason that Christ became man, so that those who were unready to love a distant and absolute heavenly king might be touched, and their hearts moved, by the sight of a wandering carpenter nailed to a cross. Incidentally, one line from this scene, "The law was not made for thee, but for all others" (Esther 15:13) has been interpreted as a prophecy that St. Mary would be conceived free from original sin; for if we understand the law in its broadest sense, as having to do with sin and its consequence, then this line is foretelling that at least one human person would someday be born without original sin, and that would be the Mother of God.

In the love of Xerxes for Esther, then, we see both spiritual and physical elements: and most of all, we see how through love, physical desires are transformed and ennobled into something spiritual. For the sake of his love, Xerxes became the vehicle of the protection and deliverance of the Jews. Through his story we see how romantic love can be added to and converted into something greater. Like Severus Snape, Xerxes was saved through his ability to feel love, and his love led him to realize the enormity of what he had done. Contrariwise, in the passion of Herod for Salome was pure and unadorned lust, and the worst and most unnatural form of it. Esther was a child of adoption, her cousin created a family where there had not been one before. Herod's desire for Salome was, of course, incestuous, and in this sense it was a violation of the very institution of the family. More than that, actually: it was triply incestuous for she was his distant cousin, his neice, and also his stepdaughter. The fact that consanguineous relations are a crime against the very notion of the family, and that they corrode filial affection (filia) by converting it into something lower, is the reason this is considered, cross culturally, to be the worst and most unspeakable of all crimes. Where Mordecai built a family, Herod destroyed one, and in so doing he mirrored the destruction of innumerable families that his father had been responsible for at Bethlehem during the massacre of the holy innocents.

Herod, like Xerxes, was a man torn between good and evil. Xerxes, remember, signed his name to the irrevocable order for genocide before his love for Esther made him think better of it. And Herod, too, had some vague sense of who St. John the Baptist was, and even who Christ was. He had refused his wife's request to kill John, "knowing that he was a righteous and holy man", and fearing the consequences (Mark 6:20). And he had a strange fascination with Christ too, for when He was on trial for his life Herod summoned him to talk to him: "He was very glad, for he had long desired to see him...and he was hoping to see some sign done by him" (Luke 23:8). Oscar Wilde, for all that he shocked Victorian England with his lifestyle, was at heart a Christian all his life, not just when he converted on his deathbed, and his portrait of Herod in the play "Salome" is a dark, haunting vision of a man who knows that e is doing evil, has some vague and instinctual sense of what good and evil are, but somehow cannot stop himself from going over the edge, and laments at the end, "I have committed a great crime against some unknown god." Herod, who had allowed himself to pervert and corrupt true love- through fratricide and incest- at long last, faced with the choice of good and evil chose evil: Xerxes, caught between good and evil, chose good. When the round table breaks, as C.S. Lewis said, all men must choose the side of Galahad or of Mordred.

The last thing I'd note about Esther is that it indicates, perhaps, that today's incessant arguments about gay marriage, and some of the other sexual issues, are perhaps missing the point. Clearly, going by sacred scripture, by natural law, and by tradition, God is not a big fan either of polygamy or of divorce: "Whosoever puts away his wife, saving for adultery, causes her to commit adultery" (Matthew 5:32). They are sins, and I would be happy to condemn them. Yet in spite of that, he was able to work through Xerxes' polygamous marriage following a divorce, and to use it for his ends. Xerxes should not have divorced Vashti, and he shouldn't have married a whole slew of different women: but given his sins, God was still willing to infuse his marriage to Esther with love and affection, and to use that love and affection to make Xerxes a new and better person, and to save him from becoming an accomplice to genocide. If God could work through and ennoble a divorced polygamous marriage, which we generally agree is sin, then why could he not work through a gay relationship, or an unmarried relationship, which not all of us are even sure if they are sins? The story of Esther, finally, tells me that God is ultimately more concerned about the content of a romantic and sexual relationship, and of whether it is characterized by love and by self-giving, then by the form. "For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Domine Jesu Christi, Fili Dei, miserere mei peccatoris. Amen.

A consideration of torture

There are at least two separate issues involved with the question of torture. Firstly, is it ever licit, from a Christian point of view, to deliberately inflict serious physical pain on another human being? Secondly, is it legitimate for us to do so for the purposes of interrogation? Because it’s possible to inflict pain for many reasons- for one’s own pleasure, for intimidation, for the correction of a criminal, the expiation of sin, procuring confessions, extracting information, etc. Inflicting pain could potentially be legitimate for some of these purposes and not for others. This will be a long post, but here is what I think: the answer to this question is Yes, and No. I believe that pain can sometimes be legitimately inflicted as a punishment: but as a means of interrogation, it is wrong.

Let’s start by rejecting two premises that often seem to sneak into this debate. There is, first, the idea that pleasure is good, pain is evil, and that to inflict pain on another person is always wrong; and there is the equal and opposite error that war is hell, and that whatever you need to do to win it is justified. The second is of course, easily rejected: that is the logic of Hiroshima and of the Stalinist purges. The first however must be refuted at more length.

Pain is not, in the Christian conception, an inherent evil, nor is death. Both of these are considered penal, a result of living in a fallen world. People often think that the New Testament forbids capital and corporal punishment, but this isn’t so. Christ implicitly accepted the legitimacy of corporal and capital punishment when He didn’t correct the thief on the cross, who acknowledged, after being scourged and crucified, that we receive the due reward of our deeds (Luke 23:41). St. Paul accepted capital punishment when he pled to Festus, For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die (Acts 25:11). Now as St. Thomas Aquinas said, if the death penalty is sometimes legitimate, then it must be legitimate to inflict, on criminals, physical punishment short of death. And indeed, Christ seems to acknowledge that in certain circumstances, physical punishment is legitimate: that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes (Luke 12:47). The question then, is this: when is it legitimate to inflict pain?

The guideline that we should use, as Christians, is what Christ told us was the second greatest commandment, after the duty to love God: And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Matthew 22:39). And how do we know what is a loving action? And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise (Luke 6:31). So the question we need to ask, before we consider inflicting physical pain on a human being, is this: would we ever be in a position where we would like physical pain to be inflicted on ourselves?

Well, perhaps. Most of us would prefer not to be caned or whipped for no reason. But I can certainly imagine circumstances when I would deserve to suffer, and where I would be better off for having pain inflicted on me. Specifically, if I had done something very wrong, that I knew was wrong, and for which I needed to atone and repent for. Of course I would probably plead not to have to suffer, and not to endure pain, when it came to the sticking point. Hell, most of us cringe away from taking our blood drawn at the doctor’s. For the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak (Matthew 26:41). This doesn’t mean, however, that in the coolness of foresight we would not say that we would deserve to suffer for doing something wrong, or that in the coolness of hindsight we would not acknowledge that we were better off for having suffered for it. Our fundamental human nature, not the corrupt and fallen thing that our nature is today, is to love good and hate evil, and anything that helps to cleanse our souls, to expiate sin and to wash away the stain of guilt from our conscience, is ultimately a good thing. It is said, Thou shalt strike him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell (Proverbs 23:13), which St. Augustine invoked in defending the use of force by the state.

Is it true that suffering can expiate sin, and that we can be cleansed and made whole by enduring pain and suffering for what we have done wrong? I certainly believe so; as St. Paul said, I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's sake. (Colossians 1:24). As Pope Paul VI said, The necessity of mortification of the flesh stands clearly revealed if we consider the fragility of our nature, in which, since Adam’s sin, flesh and spirit have contrasting desires. And as his present day successor has said, suffering is the process by which we mature [spiritually]. Simone Weil, interpreting Plato, sets out the purpose of legal and judicial punishment: to overcome pride and self-love in the heart of the offender, and to restore him to a place within the moral order (The Need for Roots). Some kind of suffering is necessary to do this. For the root of sin and wrongdoing is pride: as St. Augustine puts it, original sin is summed up thus: when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. (City of God, 14:13). And suffering is necessary to restore us to humility. When we suffer, all we can think about is suffering, and we are reduced to the position of a child, asking “Why am I being hurt?” And through the process of answering that question for ourselves, we can come to repent, and to love good and hate evil. Thus it is said learned he obedience by the things which he suffered (Hebrews 5:8), and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross; wherefore God also hath highly exalted him (Philippians 2:7).

So physical pain is not intrinsically wrong when used moderately, as a punishment, for the sake of the correction of the criminal. The Left wing government of Bolivia recently legalized moderate corporal punishment, as an alternative to prison, for some minor crimes. Other countries- Malaysia, Trinidad, Guyana- also practice corporal punishment today, and I don’t think we would call them evil or uncivilized. So if we wanted to change the laws to sentence convicted terrorist to be caned, say, 20 times as part of their punishment, or to be forced to perform grueling physical labor, or to endure rough treatment in general- with caterpillars, with being slapped in the face or given a bloody nose- I wouldn’t have a problem with that. In fact, I think that the modern West has gone far too much to the other extreme of shunning all punishment of the body. In what way is it more humane to place a man in solitary confinement than to give him a caning and then let him go home to his family? In what way is the psychological suffering of prison more humane than the physical pain of caning? The only way it can be is if you believe that the body is more real or more important than the soul, such that only punishment inflicted on the body is really wrong. But that relies on a deeply anti-Christian anthropology that I reject. Excessive physical punishment, that threatens maiming, organ failure or death, is of course wrong: even those who are sentenced to death should not be tortured to death. Death is enough of a punishment. But moderate physical punishment, when it is done for the correction of the criminal, for the expiation of the crime, is not a bad thing. Nor is it incompatible with loving our neighbor, for to love our neighbor often involves trying to get him to correct his behavior and overcome his moral deficiencies, and physical pain can be a means to that end. The spirit is higher than the body, and sometimes we can cause physical pain to ourselves or to others in order to become morally cleansed: and that is just, and right. A man doesn’t love his child any less when he spanks the kid; nor does an Aymara court in Bolivia love their prisoner less when they sentence him to be whipped with a rope. There are circumstances in which I think I would deserve, and would need, to have physical pain inflicted on me: therefore, I say that it isn’t wrong in general.

Now the other, and more difficult question: If inflicting physical pain is not always a bad thing, and if it can be justified as a form of punishment against criminals, then can it be justified too as a means for getting information? Vital information, which could save thousands of lives? Information that we desperately need, which could be gotten in no other way? Information that we can depend on, information about a ticking bomb or an assassination plot?

I say that it cannot. This may be surprising. After I’ve just defended corporal punishment, which is considered horrid and barbaric by most of the enlightened chattering classes in the West today, it might seem as though I should defend torture of suspects too. After all, punishing a criminal (according to the thoughts of many ‘enlightened’ people) serves no actual good function, whereas torturing for information could save millions of lives. But my answer is, still, “No.” And here’s why. There are many reasons why torturing suspects to get information is not equivalent to corporal punishment, and why beating a suspect for information is wrong, even if beating a criminal as a legally prescribed part of his punishment is not.

1) Physical pain, to be justified, must be inflicted with the goal (at least one of the goals) being the correction of the criminal and the expiation of his crime: it must be for his own good as well as for ours. Interrogative torture is not. Its goal is the procuring of information. The prisoner is being treated as a means to our end, rather than as a person that we are seeking, out of paternal love, to morally correct. And using a prisoner as simply a conduit of information, instead of a person about whose soul we are concerned, is wrong.

2) Physical pain, to be justified, needs to be proportionate to the crime committed, for it derives its justification from the fact that the victim is guilty. But interrogative torture is not: rather, its duration depends on how willing the suspect is to stand pain, and how unwilling he is to tell us what we want to know. These things are not closely related to actual moral guilt. The punishment must fit the crime: but interrogative torture doesn’t fit the crime, therefore it is not an acceptable use of physical force.

3) Physical pain, to be justified, must be moderate in extent. But torture, if it is moderate, will quickly fail, for terrorists will be trained to withstand it. If 10 punches in the nose is the limit, then terrorists will train each other to hold out to the eleventh. Torture will only work if it is open ended and potentially unlimited- if the victim knows his pain will stop only when he concedes what he knows. Because torture runs the risk of becoming open ended, it has tremendous potential to be extended beyond any reasonable limit.

4) Physical pain, to be justified, should not threaten life. But some of our techniques- waterboarding, simulated crucifixion- can and have threatened life. Therefore our torture program has transgressed the limits of acceptable severity.

5) Physical pain cannot be inflicted on innocent people who have not done anything wrong. We would only concede to being punished or caused pain if we had done something wrong, and felt we needed to atone for it; but no one would consent to be tortured while still innocent. We do not know, in a legal sense, whether any of these people are guilty, since they have been convicted of no crime. Legally, they are prisoners of war, not convicted criminals. Sure, a lot of them are probably guilty. But we don’t know that. They might have had varying degrees of culpability- some of them may be mentally ill, some of them may have had their families threatened by the jihadists, some may have boasted falsely of the degree of their involvement. Until we know that they are guilty, we cannot impose a punishment on them, and that includes any kind of physical punishment.

Ariel Dorfman tells a chilling story of a man he knew in Chile, a young socialist revolutionary, who had escaped from Argentina. When he got to Chile he started boasting, in a bar, about how he was an expert with arms of every kind, and how he was going to overthrow the Chilean government. All nonsense, just to impress young Chilean women. But he was picked up for it, and tortured. And tortured, and tortured. Of course, he confessed, to all sorts of nonexistent plots. And when the Chileans found out he was lying, they tortured him some more.

That is what we risk when we use torture as a means of interrogation. Pain should have a place in our criminal justice system: it can lead to moral correction, and it is not incompatible with loving our neighbor to cause him pain if it is necessary to do so. Again, it is said If you accept, accept through love; if you correct, correct through love….(Seventh Homily on the Epistles of St. John). But it is not compatible with loving our neighbor to use him as a means to an end, even if that end be valuable. And it is not compatible with loving our neighbor to cause him pain if we are not sure- legally and morally- that he has done something wrong. The just and innocent man ye shall not put to death (Exodus 23:7), even for a good cause, and nor should we cause him serious pain if there is a decent possibility he’s innocent. The right of Christians to assume political power and to try to embody states that pursue natural law and Christian values, is foretold by St. John of Patmos: And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations: And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers. (Revelation 2:26-27). But with rights come responsibilities, and with the right to use physical force, that the state receives from God, comes the duty to use force subject to the limitations of natural and divine law: only when necessary, only when proportionate to the crime, only when pursuing the good of the criminal as well as that of society, and only against the guilty. For St. John tells us, too, speaking of how we are to combat political evil (under the figure of Babylon, i.e. Rome), Reward her even as she rewarded you (Revelation 18:6) thus use force against the guilty alone. Thus it is categorically forbidden to use any kind of punishment- death, pain, or both- on those who we know are innocent, or whom we are not sufficiently sure are guilty. The risk of killing the innocent leads many to oppose the death penalty. While I disagree with them I would certainly be opposed to killing suspects without a trial, and such is the case with pain too; until someone has been convicted of a crime, they must be spared from pain and death.

Love thy neighbor as thyself. We are commanded to love even the prisoner, for Christ identifies himself with the prisoner: I was in prison, and ye came unto me (Matthew 25:36). He makes no exception for the guilty: note that he does not say I was held innocently in prison or I was held without cause, but simply I was in prison. Christ loves the guilty and is especially solicitous about them, for What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it (Luke 15:4). Thus we are bound to love the prisoner too. We can punish him harshly- by imprisonment, by hard labor, by pain, even by death- but we cannot do this merely for our sake, but also for his. Inasmuch as Christ identifies with the prisoner, the purpose of all punishment must be, at least in part, to destroy and discipline that aspect of the man that is opposed to the Good, in order that that part which is of the Good can flourish. Pain must have this intention, among others, and it can never be imposed solely for our own sake; we can never use the prisoner as a simple means to get information.

Love thy neighbor as thyself. We would not want to be caused pain when we may not have done anything to deserve it, or when the pain was inflicted according to someone else's information needs, as opposed to our own need for correction. Thus we should not impose it ourselves. The law of Christ was not meant to be impossible, and it does not rule out using harsh and violent methods, even pain and death. Christ was no pacifist, and no soft-on-crime hippie. He came to rule us with a rod of iron, to bring a sword, to baptize us by fire, and as fire illuminates and cleanses it also destroys. But a responsible person is very careful about when and where he uses fire. The desire to requite suffering by suffering, to inflict pain on ourselves or others in order to expiate our sin, is a natural outgrowth of the desire for justice and retribution, and not wrong in itself. But like other desires, it can become wrong when exercised outside of certain limits. To indulge the desire for vengeance outside of the strict limits of judicial punishment, is against the purpose of that desire, and is deeply wrong. We have strict rules about against whom, to what extent, and for what purposes it is legitimate to inflict pain, and waterboarding transgresses them.

And thus I arrive at this compromise. Physical pain- caterpillars, slapping, even caning and whipping- can be justified for the purpose of punishment, but not for the purpose of interrogation. My original questions were 1) can pain ever be legitimately inflicted as a punishment, and 2) can it be inflicted for the purpose of interrogation. The Catholic Catechism of today, and the laws of the United States, say No to both questions: much of the Christian tradition however, for over a thousand years, said Yes to both. In the light of scripture, natural-law reasoning, and my understanding of tradition- both as it stands today and in the light of history- I say Yes to the first question, and No to the second. And in doing so, of course, I’m sure both liberals and concervatives will be rapid to tell me how wrong I am.

AIDS in Africa

This is what Pope Benedict said a couple days ago, in Cameroon, with regard to the AIDS crisis and how to solve it.

"If there is no soul, if Africans do not help themselves, the scourge of AIDS cannot be resolved by the distribution of prophylactics: to the contrary, the risk is to augment the problem. The solution can be found only in twin labors: the first, a humanization of sexuality, that is a spiritual and human renewal that brings with it a new way of behaving with one another, and second, also a true friendship most of all for suffering people, the availability, also with sacrifices, with personal renouncements, in order to be with the suffering."


Naturally, the American mass media, which gets the vapors when anyone makes any kind of challenge- from the right or the left- to the cosmopolitan culture of late-capitalist liberal civilization of which it sees itself as the foremost defender, got the vapors at this too. "The Pope forbids the use of condoms to fight AIDS" they have been saying. With the implication, of course, that this shows what an outmoded, benighted reactionary Benedict XVI is. Surely nowadays, the knowing and worldly readers of the New York Times have moved beyond such medieval prejudices. We know that sex is just a fun pastime, like bowling only messier. Lobbing a few condoms around will make it good, clean fun for everyone, and what could be the harm? The more the merrier. We are educated people of the 21st century. Who needs things like fidelity and restraint? We are smart enough to invent technical fixes to our problems. Insecticides to get rid of insect plagues, and condoms to get rid of AIDS.

Well, no. First of all, I should start by saying that the mass media's misquotation of Benedict XVI is beyond misleading- in a just society it would be considered criminally libelous. (Whether it was libelous out of malice or ignorance I don't know, but probably the latter). Of course Benedict XVI opposes condoms, in general, on the grounds that they separate the unitive and procreative aspects of the sex act, and thus do violence to nature. The Catholic church has taken a firm stand against artificial birth control since its inception (a stand that, for reasons I've made clear in the past, I disagree with). But what he didn't say, in the quote attributed to him, is that condoms do nothing to prevent the transmission of disease. Read the line once again.

He's saying that the heart of any effective effort to counter HIV in Africa must focus on behavior change. And he's correct. I've lived in Madagascar, and from what I hear from people who have lived or spent time in Africa, the sexual mores are not that different. Which is to say, deeply in crisis. Men who are traveling away from their wives for as little as a weekend often go to a prostitute to entertain themselves. Men will have one or two wives and a couple of girlfriends, all concurrently. Girls often enter sexual relationships with older men when they're only in their early teens. Prostitution is widely socially accepted. Women lack the social power to insist on birth control. Sex is often considered as casually as shaking hands. And so on.

You don't have to be a believer in the strict Catholic position on sexual morals (I'm not) to think this is deeply problematic. Let's leave aside the emotional and spiritual damage this kind of promiscuity does to the people involved: from a disease prevention point of view, it's really, really unhealthy. Even if condoms have only a 1% failure rate, if one sleeps with enough people then the chances of getting a disease are not insignificant. The best ways to prevent STDs, it should be obvious, are by reducing one's number of partners.

It would be different if we were talking about a country like Sweden, or somewhere in Latin America. Those societies are far from traditionalist Catholic sexual morals, but they're also far from the kind of promiscuity that characterizes many African societies. In the African context, however, behavior change is the sine qua non of any effective effort to reduce HIV incidence. As long as sexual behavior remains unchanged, throwing condoms into the mix will simply make little difference. It's like throwing a band-aid on a deep wound, and at worse, if it encourages more promiscuity, it could actually increase disease transmission. Remember when everyone thought abortion would decrease illegitimacy rates? It actually accomplished the opposite.

Let me be clear here. I disapprove somewhat of condoms, as I think they're qualitatively different than hormonal birth control, but I don't have any problem with the Pill. The Pill was designed to mimic the natural hormonal changes following pregnancy, and it suppresses fertility through hormonal mechanisms in a similar way to how lactation does. Moreover, it does not impose a physical barrier between a couple- the man and woman are still sharing their entire bodies with each other. Condoms are different, as they interpose a physical barrier and thus detract not simply from the procreative but also from the unitive aspect of sexuality. They are thus, 'against nature' in a sense that birth control pills aren't (and, it must be said, they also facilitate casual liaisons, which the Pill doesn't). I also disapprove, of course, of casual sex. While I don't think a couple needs to be married in order to licitly have intercourse, they should be in a long-term, loving, monogamous relationship. If a relationship is characterized by 'caritas' as well as by 'eros', then it seems to me that it can legitimately be a locus for the sexual act. However, casual liaisons are right out.

This is my understanding of what Christ would have us do; it's of course a liberal interpretation of Christian sexual morals by any historic interpretation, but I believe on reflection that it's the true one. However, if you insist on breaking even this attenuated code, based on natural law and my understanding of scripture and my interpretation of tradition, then in my opinion you're doing something wrong. It would be better not to add another wrong (risking the spread of disease) to the first wrong, and so in such circumstances I would suggest that if you ARE going to have casual sex, then you should use condoms. But the better rule is not to have casual sex in the first place. Stay within the context of serious relationships- not necessarily procreative marriages, but at least open to flowering into procreative marriages- and use a combination of the pill, natural family planning, or both- and your risk of disease will be minimal. I don't think this is an inconsistent message: "Don't have casual sex, but if you do, then use condoms." Many vegetarians would say the same, for example, about chickens: "Don't kill chickens for food, but if you must, then at least don't keep them in horrible factory-farm conditions beforehand."

In short, behavior change has to come first. Condoms can serve as a third-best option for those who refuse to follow what, I think, natural law suggests. But the best alternative is to have sex only in the context of serious relationships, and to be faithful to your partner. For young people under 18 or so, of course, the best alternative is not to have sex at all. I don't think morality requires us to abstain till marriage. But I do think that you should abstain until you are a legal adult. That is why the anti-HIV programs in Africa that have WORKED, stress abstinence first, then fidelity, and then condoms.

It should be clear from all this that in part I disagree with Pope Benedict, but in part I also agree with him. If there is no soul, i.e. if we approach sexuality first and foremost as a health issue rather than a moral and spiritual issue, then we will get neither health nor spirituality: all we will do is make the problem worse. One doesn't need to be a Catholic or to agree with traditionalist Catholic sexual morality to accept this. Even though Benedict is wrong about some things, his opponents among the liberal establishment are much wronger. It is their Eden of casual sex which exists in Africa right now, and that's precisely the problem.

Cyclone Relief in Madagascar

If you want to donate to relief efforts for Cyclone Fanele in Madagascar, you can do this through Catholic Relief Services. You can earmark a donation so the money goes to Madagascar cyclone relief. They are currently working in a strip down the west coast of Madagascar, including the cities of Morondava and Manja as well as, I think, surrounding rural areas.

They are, among other things, distributing food, medicine, soap, and clothes, and also trying to help repair infrastructure. Please send a donation, if you can. The cyclone hit the town of Morondava, which I know well and where I have a lot of friends and coworkers. About 80% of homes were partially damaged and 15% obliterated entirely. It's very, very sad.

A meditation on the Temptation of Christ

This is the time of the year, Lent, when we commemmorate the days that Our Lord spent in the desert: fasting, meditating and praying in advance of beginning His three-year mission, that was to culminate in His saving death. And being tempted, and overcoming temptation: three temptations above all, representing the world, the flesh and the devil. Here is the account that St. Luke the Evangelist gives:

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, Being forty days tempted of the Devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God. And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan; for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. And he brought him to the holy city, and set him on pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is also said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. And when the devil had ended all the temptation he departed from him for a season.


Now Luke was writing his gospel in an effort to be historically accurate, and we are bound, I think, to accept what he said as history. There is room for metaphorical interpretation about other things, but not about this. Christ was really tempted, in a real desert, by a real devil, and he really overcame these temptations. And in so doing, he gave us an example of faith and virtue that is eternally relevant, to our age and to every age- and, indirectly, told us much about the nature of good and evil. Here we see, more clearly than anywhere else in the Bible, the conflict of God and the Enemy in the most personal form, confronting one another. We can learn much about physical and biological phenomena by studying how organisms function in their absence, and likewise we can learn much about good by observing evil, and vice versa. It was a minor 'unclean spirit', a pitiful little demon, who was the first to recognize Christ for who and what He was: Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. We could not fully understand light if there was no such thing as darkness, and we cannot understand God fully without considering his Enemy: For the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

One interesting thing about the three temptations is that none of the gifts that the devil offered was intrinsically a bad thing. The devil offered him the gift of creating food out of nothing, of winning converts through miracles, and of reforming the world by achieving temporal power. Each of these gifts was something that, in the fulness of time, Christ would attain, either in his own person or through his disciples. There would come a day when Christ would create food not just for himself but for five thousand followers- hungry and poor men, women and children, who probably seldom had enough to eat, and who craved someone who would nourish their bodies as well as their souls. Then he took the five loaves and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven he blessed them, and brake, and gave to the disciples to set before the multitude. And they did eat, and were all filled: and there was taken up of fragments that remained to them twelve baskets. There would come a day, too, when people all over the world would be converted by a miracle. He refused, on the pinnacle of the temple, to prove himself by triumphing over physical injury: but there would come a day when he would triumph over death itself, and where the miracle of Easter would convert a third of the world. There would come a day when, for a time, the eagle was united with the dove, and the Cross flew over Constantine's legions and their heirs for a thousand years, and left, even today, the lasting idea that love and mercy should govern the world no less than the church; and we are told by the Beloved Disciple that there will come something even greater, a day when out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron. Such was the dream of Joachim of Fiora, of Thomas More, and of all the other men and women throughout the age who have dreamed of an age when men shall be ruled by love.

The Ultimate Enemy is, if nothing else, possessed of deep wisdom- and worse, wisdom untrammeled by love, justice, or mercy. He was wise enough not to offer Jesus temptations that were intrinsically immoral- to feast on the finest delicacies of Rome, to debauch himself with girls and young boys in the brothels of Athens, to drape himself in purple like a Babylonian king and send men to die in the gladiatorial arena. Rather, he tempted him with things that were intrinsically good. So often, evil consists not in choosing evil things: it consists (sometimes) in pursuing things that are good, but in the wrong place, under the wrong circumstances, at the wrong time. If Jesus had fed himself in the desert, he would yielded to the needs of his flesh instead of overcoming and conquering them, and would not have restored- on behalf of fallen humanity- the proper balance between body and spirit that was lost with the fall. (Obviously I don't believe in a literal Adam and Eve, a literal garden of Eden: but I do believe that there was a day, very early in human prehistory, when the first beings to have been gifted with a conscious and potentially immortal soul, make the decision to seek their own desires instead of God's, and in doing so fell from grace and became subject once again to the flesh). If Christ had accepted the temptation to prove His divinity by a miracle, then He would have robbed humanity of the gift of faith: for faith cannot exist where there is proof. For faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the knowledge of things unseen. If Christ had, then and there, accepted kingship He could not have died the death he was destined to die, and could not thus have saved humanity. And he could not have fully redeemed and ennobled humanity in the way He meant to, if He had ruled over them instead of inspiring Christian leaders to emerge from within humanity itself.

Consider, again, what this tells us about the Tempter. If this temptation is to mean something, if the life of Christ is to mean something, if the Crucifixion and all the suffering and bloodshed that has taken place in the name of Christ has been "worth it", then the temptation must have been real. If it wasn't, if the devil was shamming and Christ knew it, then his temptations have nothing to say to ours: our tragedy becomes his farce, and He is nothing more than the divine trickster. If Christ truly shared our suffering, if He really shared our nature, if He really shared our temptations, then the evil power must have been offering him something he desired, and He must have chosen to give something up for the sake of the higher good. And if the temptation was real, then the gifts that the devil offered must have been real too. When the devil offered him all the kingdoms of the world, I believe he was offering a gift that he really possessed. He was smart enough not to lie to Christ, and he told him the truth.

The truth, but not all the truth. This world belongs to both God and the evil power: therein lies the problem of evil, as it has been posed for thousands of years, and it's a problem to which I have no solution. "I make the darkness and the light" said Isaiah to Cyrus; but in this, I think, Isaiah was wrong and Cyrus, the Zoroastrian, was right.

Did He who made the lamb make thee? said Blake of his 'Tyger', and his question remains unanswered. In the first century, people looked at the fall of Jerusalem as evidence that this world was under the domination of evil; people thought the same at the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the coming of the black plague in the fourteenth century, the fall of the greatest city in Christendom in the fifteenth century, and all the black atrocities that our human race has committed against each other in the last few centuries. Indeed, if God rules this world and orders it to His pleasure, then how can we explain things like the fall of Constantinople? The Holocaust? How can we explain the AIDS virus, earthquakes, hurricanes? And how can we explain evolution itself? Is such a bloody, wasteful process, 'nature red in tooth and claw', the world that the Father made through the agency of the Son and his angels? Is a world in which the fittest survive and mercilessly crowd out the unfit, truly the 'best of all possible worlds'?

I don't think so, and I think in this regard the Christians of the first century were wiser than the fuzzy religious believers of today who see the world as a happy, joyous place. St. Luke was right: this world is under the domination of evil, and when the evil power offered Christ his place at the head of it, he was making a genuine offer. This universe was created by God, of course: the Nicene creed says so, as does the Gospel of John. Maker of heaven and earth. But from its beginning, evil has had a place in it, and eventually that evil grew and grew until everything that we see today- the process of evolution that underlies biology, the processes of entropy that underly chemistry- is in some sense tainted and corrupt.

But in the long run, this doesn't matter. We have an assurance that something in this world still persists with the memory of the one who created it. We have the assurance that one day this world will be made whole, and that every temptation that Christ denied at the hand of the devil- to create food, to overcome death, to rule with a rod of iron- He will accept at the hand of the Father. And we have the assurance that this world- this world where our bodies disobey our souls and cry out for things that aren't good for us, this world in which evil men rule over the good, and send innocent people to slavery and death, this world from which God seems so distant and millions of us cry out for miracles that we may believe, and don't find them.....that ultimately, all this will pass away and be transcended. In this world, says Christ, ye shall have tribulation. But fear not: I have overcome the world.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen.