“How is it that the Lamb of God bears the sins of the world?”

Poet Denise Levertov

Agnus Dei

by Denise Levertov

Given that lambs
are infant sheep,
that sheep are afraid and foolish, and lack
the means of self-protection, having
neither rage nor claws,
venom nor cunning,
what then
is this ‘Lamb of God’?

This pretty creature, vigorous
to nuzzle at milky dugs,
woolbearer, bleater,
leaper in air for delight of being, who finds in astonishment
four legs to land on, the grass
all it knows of the world?
With whom we would like to play,
whom we’d lead with ribbons, but may not bring
into our houses because
it would spoil the floor with its droppings?

What terror lies concealed
in strangest words, O lamb
of God that taketh away
the Sins of the World: an innocence
smelling of ignorance,
born in bloody snowdrifts,
licked by forebearing
dogs more intelligent than its entire flock put together?

God then,
encompassing all things, is
defenseless? Omnipotence
has been tossed away,
reduced to a wisp of damp wool?

And we
frightened, bored, wanting
only to sleep ‘til catastrophe
has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us,
wanting then
to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,

we who in shamefaced private hope
had looked to be plucked from fire and given
a bliss we deserved for having imagined it,

is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings

suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold in our icy hearts
a shivering God?

So be it.
Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let’s try
if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.

* * * * * * * *

Mosaic of Doubting Thomas, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, 500-520 AD.

The Disciple of Doubt

by Dan Clendenin

March 27, 2016

For Sunday April 3, 2015

Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year C)

Acts 5:27–32

Psalm 118:14–29 or Psalm 150

Revelation 1:4–8

John 20:19–31

On Easter Sunday, we Christians condensed our confession

down to three words: "Christ is risen!" 

Those three words are a game changer.

Without the resurrection, Jesus is just another interesting teacher. But with it, believers confess that God in Christ has defeated death and reconciled the cosmos to himself. And so the Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote, "If Christ is raised from the dead, nothing else matters. If he is not raised from the dead, nothing else matters."

"This is what we preach, and this is what you believed," Paul wrote to the Corinthians.

Paul raised the bar about as high as you can when he said that no one should believe a lie about the resurrection, and that no one should preach a lie. If Christ isn't raised, said Paul, then the first witnesses were, in Pascal's famous words, "deceived or deceivers."

This week is different.  John says that he wrote his gospel with an agenda, "that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ" (20:31).  But the reading this week is not about faith but about doubt — in particular, Thomas's disbelief in the resurrection. 

Resurrection?  Really?

Except for the times when he is grocery-listed with the other disciples, there are only three references to Thomas. They're all in John's gospel, and they all reveal Thomas's sceptical bent.

After Lazarus died, and Jesus planned to return to Judea (where villagers almost stoned him), Thomas replied, "Let us also go, that we may die with him." Then, when Jesus told his disciples that they would join him in glory, Thomas questioned him: "Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?"

And then there's this week's gospel. When told that Jesus had appeared to the other disciples, Thomas was incredulous: "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."     

The last several years, I've enjoyed reading the poetry of Denise Levertov (1923–1997).  Her personal story is so interesting.

Levertov was born in England to a Welsh mother and a Russian Hasidic father. He had emigrated to the UK from Leipzig, converted to Christianity, and become an Anglican priest. After moving to the United States in 1948, Levertov taught at a number of places, including eleven years at Stanford (1982–1993). By the time she died, she had published fifty volumes.

Carved panel of Doubting Thomas,
Abbey of Santo Domingo del Silos, Spain, c. 1150.

It was at Stanford, where her papers are now housed, that Levertov converted to Christianity at the age of sixty. Her little book The Stream and the Sapphire collects thirty-eight poems that trace her "slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith."

Levertov always had an affinity for Thomas the Doubter. She wrote a Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus. And in The Stream and The Sapphire she included the poem St. Thomas Didymus.

The Greek Didymus and the Aramaic T'omas both mean "the twin." In her poem, though, Levertov imagines Thomas identifying with his spiritual twin rather than his biological brother.

Thomas's spiritual twin is the desperate and doubting father in Mark 9:24: "I do believe, help my unbelief."

Long after Thomas saw the miraculous healing of the little boy, the doubt of the father plagued him. "Despite all that I witnessed, his question remained my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer, known only to doctor and patient. To others I seemed well enough."

Here is Levertov's poem:

In the hot street at noon I saw him

a small man

gray but vivid, standing forth

beyond the crowd’s buzzing

holding in desperate grip his shaking

teethgnashing son,

and thought him my brother.

I heard him cry out, weeping and speak

those words,

Lord, I believe, help thou

mine unbelief,

and knew him

my twin:

a man whose entire being

had knotted itself

into the one tightdrawn question,

Why,

why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,

why is this child who will soon be a man

tormented, torn, twisted?

Why is he cruelly punished

who has done nothing except be born?

The twin of my birth

was not so close

as that man I heard

say what my heart

sighed with each beat, my breath silently

cried in and out,

in and out.

After the healing,

he, with his wondering

newly peaceful boy, receded;

no one

dwells on the gratitude, the astonished joy,

the swift

acceptance and forgetting.

I did not follow

to see their changed lives.

What I retained

was the flash of kinship.

Despite

all that I witnessed,

his question remained

my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer,

known

only to doctor and patient. To others

I seemed well enough.

So it was

that after Golgotha

my spirit in secret

lurched in the same convulsed writhings

that tore that child

before he was healed.

And after the empty tomb

when they told me that He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,

told me

that though He had passed through the door like a ghost

He had breathed on them

the breath of a living man –

even then

when hope tried with a flutter of wings

to lift me –

still, alone with myself,

my heavy cry was the same: Lord

I believe,

help thou mine unbelief.

I needed

blood to tell me the truth,

the touch

of blood. Even

my sight of the dark crust of it

round the nailholes

didn’t thrust its meaning all the way through

to that manifold knot in me

that willed to possess all knowledge,

refusing to loosen

unless that insistence won

the battle I fought with life

But when my hand

led by His hand’s firm clasp

entered the unhealed wound,

my fingers encountering

rib-bone and pulsing heat,

what I felt was not

scalding pain, shame for my

obstinate need,

but light, light streaming

into me, over me, filling the room

as I had lived till then

in a cold cave, and now

coming forth for the first time,

the knot that bound me unravelling,

I witnessed

all things quicken to color, to form,

my question

not answered but given

its part

in a vast unfolding design lit

by a risen sun.

Not all those who saw the risen Christ believed. In his last recorded appearance in Matthew 28:17, we read that "when they saw him, they worshiped, but some were doubtful."

And not all those who believed saw him after his resurrection. Thomas was an exception, said Jesus: "Because you have seen me you believe? Blessed are those who did not see and believed."

Armenian illuminated manuscript in the Malatia Gospel,

Doubting Thomas, by Toros Roslin, 1268 AD.

Likewise in 1 Peter 1:8: "Though you have not seen him, you love him, and though you do not see him now, but believe in him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory."

A week later, after touching the wounds of Jesus, Thomas confessed, "My Lord and my God!"

In Levertov's poem, Thomas's questions weren't answered; they were put into a larger context and a different light.

In the end, the famous doubter became a passionate witness. The Acts of Thomas from the early third century says that Thomas took the gospel to India by 52 AD. Today, the St. Thomas Christians trace their origins to this disciple of doubt.

NOTE: For more on Levertov, see the two critical biographies by Dana Green, Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2012); and Donna Krolik Hollenberg, A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); and the recent Denise Levertov, Collected Poems, edited and annotated by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, with an Introduction by Eavan Boland (New York: New Directions, 2013), 1063pp.

* * * * * * * *

Talking to Grief

by Denise Levertov

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you

like a homeless dog

who comes to the back door

for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.

I should coax you

into the house and give you

your own corner,

a worn mat to lie on,

your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living

under my porch.

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider

my house your own

and me your person

and yourself

my own dog. 

* * * * * * * *

What The Figtree Said

by Denise Levertov

Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! His friends

were blushing for Him

in secret; wouldn’t admit they were shocked.

They thought Him

petulant to curse me! – yet how could the Lord

be unfair? – so they looked away,

then and now.

But I, I knew that

helplessly barren though I was,

my day had come. I served

Christ the Poet,

who spoke in images: I was at hand,

a metaphor for their failure to bring forth

what is within them (as figs

were not within me). They who had walked

in His sunlight presence,

they could have ripened,

could have perceived His thirst and hunger,

His innocent appetite;

they could have offered

human fruits – compassion, comprehension –

without being asked,

without being told of need.

My absent fruit

stood for their barren hearts. He cursed

not me, not them, but

(ears that hear not, eyes that see not)

their dullness, that withholds

gifts unimagined.

* * * * * * * *

'Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer'

Jul 19, 2012

SchAdvStudy

Dana Greene (Emory University)

Poetry and Prayer: Continuities & Discontinuities - 'Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer'

An international conference organized jointly by the Institute of English Studies and Heythrop College, University of London.

The analogy and continuity between poetry and prayer, the poetical and the mystical, has often been discussed. The psychological mechanism used by grace to raise us to prayer is, Henry Bremond wrote, the same as that set in motion in poetic experience. Both poetry and prayer are rooted in an inner experience of concrete and fundamental values so that both invite, using the language of John Henry Newman, a real rather than a notional assent. Reading a poem can be perceived as a prayerful experience. W.H. Auden wrote: 'to pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention -- on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God -- that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.'

And yet it is also true that we have no shared understanding of the terms 'prayer' and 'poetry'. Some might claim that there is no connection between them. The traditions of poetry and prayer are numerous and the connections between them elusive. And poetry is, self-evidently, not exactly the same as prayer.

The conference will consider the similarities, interrelatedness and differences between poetry and prayer. What do poetry and prayer share? How do they differ? In what ways do they relate to each other? Theoretical reflections and historical surveys will provide a context for the discussion of individual texts and authors from different countries and cultural and religious traditions.

* * * * * * * *

Denise Levertov: six poems

Mar 15, 2009

Bloodaxe Books

Denise Levertov reads six poems from her later collections, three from EVENING TRAIN (1992) and three later included in her posthumously published collection SANDS OF THE WELL (1998). This is an extract from an hour-long reading she gave for the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles on 7 December 1993. The poems are: 'Settling', 'Open Secret', 'Tragic Error',  'The Danger Moment', 'A Gift' and 'For Those Whom the Gods Love Less', three of which were also included in her SELECTED POEMS (New Directions, 2002), which was published in Britain as NEW SELECTED POEMS (Bloodaxe Books, 2003):

http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepag...

Denise Levertov (1923-97) was born in Essex, and educated at home by her father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who became an Anglican priest, and by her Welsh mother. In 1948, she emigrated to America, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as 'the most subtly skilful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving,' and during the following decades she became 'a poet who may just be the finest writing in English today' (Kirkus Reviews). Throughout her life, she worked also as a political activist, campaigning tirelessly for civil rights and environmental causes, and against the Vietnam War, the Bomb and US-backed regimes in Latin America.

This video is copyright Lannan Foundation 1994 and posted on YouTube with the permission of the Lannan Foundation. 

* * * * * * * *

More on Denise Levertov poems, bio, essays:

The Poetry of R.E. Slater - "Meet Poet Denise Levertov"

Confronting the End of Meaning: Crucifixion and the Critique of Signs and Wonders

Francisco de Zurbaran , Agnus Dei , 1636 - 40 , San Diego Museum of Art , California , USA

3 Reasons the Human Jesus is Important

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2015/03/3-reasons-human-jesus-is-important/

by Peter Enns

March 31, 2015

Comments

Guest Blogger Jared Byas

This week Christians celebrate the crazy idea that God became human.

While affirming this in theory, my evangelical upbringing was very uncomfortable with the idea of  a Human Jesus. We had to admit Jesus was human but that didn’t mean we had to like it.

After all, the God Jesus is where the magic happens. Human Jesus sometimes muddles the important stuff, takes our eyes off the ball about heaven and whatnot. But here, I submit 3 reasons why Human Jesus is important to remember:

1. God gets that we are a mess.

Jesus experienced the love of his mother and the betrayal of his best friends. He felt the beautiful sensuality of getting his feet wiped with the hair of a young woman and the tortuous pain of getting his feet nailed to a cross.

In seminary it was through seeing Jesus as unapologetically human that I was able to see that God doesn’t want me to become superhuman but wants me to be a loved person.

Christianity isn’t an instruction manual for how to be perfect like God but a story about how God became like us. And that’s a crucial difference.

2. God is willing to join the mess.

God doesn’t mind “looking bad” for the sake of those God loves.

If you want to be in relationship with broken humans, you run the risk of looking broken yourself. God doesn’t seem to care. Why do we?

The streak I see in Human Jesus is the holy being so involved in the lives of the unholy that people are uncomfortable with how, from the outside, it’s hard to tell the difference. I see a God who, for the sake of love would risk reputation, trading in “omnipotent” for “glutton” and “drunk.”

3. Because of #1 & #2, I expect a very human-looking Bible.

If the same God that came to earth as an unimpressive carpenter from an underperforming people group also provided us a book, I would expect it to look very human. Would it run the risk of looking ordinary, unrefined, and altogether human?

Yes. Point taken. The Bible looks a lot like Jesus.

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Confronting the End of Meaning:

Crucifixion and the Critique of Signs and Wonders

http://peterrollins.net/2015/03/confronting-the-end-of-meaning-crucifixion-and-the-critique-of-signs-and-wonders/

by Peter Rollins

March 03, 2015

Last night Tony Jones had a launch for his latest book Did God Kill Jesus. The book itself is an excellent and very readable overview of the various ways that the church has understood the meaning and significance of the Crucifixion. Partly motivated by Trip Fuller’s statement, “God has to be at least as nice as Jesus,” he goes further than simply describing the basic approaches and endeavours to find a way of understanding the Crucifixion that prevents it [from] being mired in a theology that justifies violence, anti-Semitism, exclusion, and political oppression.

In the book Jones views the incarnation as signifying a fundamental shift in the way God relates to human beings (shifting God from a place of sympathy regarding humans to empathy). The infinite lives into the finite and tastes the existential predicament of human subjectivity. Including condemnation by the law, oppression and a sense of alienation (Crucifixion).

The main problem I have with this approach is that Tony continues to see the Crucifixion as a meaningful event. It is an event that must be integrated into a certain apologetic system. An approach that generates so many of the problems that Tony brings up in the book… how to make an event that seems to defy everything we think of the Absolute, fit with it.

Below I have taken an excerpt from The Divine Magician that outlines a critique of this idea. It begins by referencing a previous argument concerning “freedom from the sacred-object” and closes before I go on to draw the consequences of the position I outline. Both of which are important to the position. But I hope it at least introduces the idea that Crucifixion might operate as a rupture in meaning.

This freedom from the sacred-object also spells freedom from the need to find an overarching meaning to life. Indeed, the apostle Paul directly attacks the idea of Christianity offering a system of meaning in his attacks on what he called “signs” and “wisdom.” Signs and wisdom represent two ways in which we seek meaning. Through either apologetic argument or the occurrence of unusual or unexplainable events, we want to find ways to justify our beliefs.

To the Jew a "Stumbling Block"

While the affirmation of signs and wisdom to justify a particular religious position is part-and-parcel of religious discourse, Paul sets his sights firmly against them when critiquing the Jewish community of his day for seeking the former and the Greeks for wanting the latter,

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

What’s fascinating here is the way Paul sets up the Crucifixion as the very opposite of a sign or wisdom. From the perspective of both, the Crucifixion can strike one as nothing but empty nonsense. Why? Because this method of execution symbolized a divine curse. More than this, the idea of an innocent man, let alone God, being murdered in such horrific terms strikes against the idea of justice, reason, or goodness.

It is a meaningless, absurd, and offensive event, something theologian Paul Hessert picks up in his book Christ and the End of Meaning,

Anyone executed by hanging was seen in Jewish tradition as cursed by God. The sign of such a death was taken as divine corroboration of the administration of human justice. In other words, God was seen as acting in this sign-event to give the victim “what was coming to him.”

As that which runs against the very idea of a sign, Hessert argues that what we’re confronted with is a type of profound offense to reason:

The affront is not merely the case of the ignominious, brutal death of Jesus . . . [it is] to the whole religious outlook that searches for signs. . . . Preaching “Christ crucified” is not merely saying that bad things happen to good people but that God’s approach to us belies our expectations.

In other words, the event of the Crucifixion is actually the very contradiction of our expectations. This contradiction is much more than the liberal concept that the cross represents the idea of a good person being killed because he stood up against injustice. It is rather a direct confrontation of all that we think religion and God is about—it is that which breaks apart “our sense of reality.”

To Greek Stoicism "foolishness"

In the scripture passage quoted previously, Paul connects the desire for wisdom with the Greeks and their development of classical philosophy (the “love of wisdom”). The Greeks were not so much interested in signs, but rather with the eternal realm of ideas. They sought an underlying rational structure that would make sense of the passing, decaying nature of the world and render it all meaningful.

The preeminent teachers of wisdom at the time of Jesus were the Stoics. Stoicism was the ancient Hellenistic philosophy that emphasized an emotionally balanced life based upon a will that was in accord to nature, a strong moral temperament, and a deeply rational outlook.

These teachers would often compete with Christian preachers for an audience and argued that behind the chaos of our lived experience there was a harmonious center, an order that could, in principle, provide a meaning for everything. The Stoics saw the brokenness and decay of the world as a type of illusion or temporary condition. While they had a strong moral theory, there was a broad acceptance of the status quo. In this way, Stoicism was able to become the philosophical outlook of the cultural elite in the Roman Empire without actually threatening some of the more barbaric and inequitable practices of the day.

The Stoics would have had little problem in accepting the liberal reading of Christ’s crucifixion as an example of one who faced injustice and suffering with [a kind of Stoic] peace and resoluteness. Indeed this Jesus would have fitted very neatly into their worldview.

For Paul, however, there was something much more profound and offensive taking place in the idea of “Christ crucified.” Indeed, Paul was reading the Crucifixion against this stoic vision of Jesus. For Paul, the Crucifixion was that which defied reduction to a sign or system of meaning. As Hessert notes,

“Christ crucified” makes no sense. Instead of linking God to the enveloping rationality that absorbs or even overrides the passing contradictions of goodness, it focuses attention on the contradiction itself. That is, “Christ crucified” is no key to the meaning of life and human events. It is a problem to meaning, a problem requiring explanation.

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Shoah

noun

1. (in secular Judaism) a Hebrew word for holocaust (sense 2) See alsoChurban (sense 2)

Word Origin literally: destruction

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Holocaust

[hol-uh-kawst, hoh-luh-]

noun

1. a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially by fire.

2. a sacrifice completely consumed by fire; burnt offering.

3. the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II

4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.

---

Hessert notes that the Shoah operates in a similar way within Jewish thought. For the Shoah is that horrific, unspeakable event that ruptures and renders offensive any attempt to make it into a divine sign or element of wider rationality. This is why the term Shoah is often preferred over Holocaust. For the latter is derived from the Greek holókauston, a term that has connections with the notion of religious sacrifice and thus religious significance. In contrast, the Shoah simply means destruction and thus lacks any justificatory undertones.

The attempt to provide a cosmic meaning for the Shoah is not simply misplaced, it is a profound offense. The event stands as an affront to all such strategies. In terms of the European intellectual tradition, the First World War can be seen to act in a similar way. One of the features of this horrific event is found in the way that the war disrupted all our attempts to tie it into some deeper meaning or significance.

It is precisely this connection with meaning, religious or otherwise, that the Crucifixion of Christ cuts against.

Once we grasp this idea of Christ representing a break with [Jewish] signs and [Greek] wisdom, we can begin to perceive how the actual existing church has fundamentally betrayed the scandal of the Crucifixion, effectively making it into a type of Stoic doctrine that doesn’t challenge our world, but confirms it.

In contrast, for Paul, “Christ crucified” is that event that defies all attempts at being reduced to some system of meaning.

It is a type of antisign that fractures religious signs.

An antiwisdom that confounds human wisdom.

A nuclear event that blows apart all of our apologetic enclosures.