The spirituality of Jesus and why it matters.

I have been wondering about the spirituality of Jesus, and how I might describe it. Nowhere in the Gospels is it described directly as such, so I need to try and infer it from what we know. There seem to me to be at least several recognisable elements.

[1] Jesus clearly stands within a tradition [see my piece on ‘Did Jesus have a spiritual director’]. He was brought up as a Jew, knew His Scriptures and the traditions which flowed from them. He was versed in rabbinic teaching. So He had a language and a symbolism which He could use with ease when talking about the things of God. Yet He also appears to have felt comfortable in criticising that tradition. For example you might expect Him to have done most of His teaching in synagogues, that would seem the obvious place, but He’s rejected at the synagogue in Nazareth, is described as preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum once, and doesn’t appear in a synagogue after that. And the experience is the same in Jerusalem: He preaches in the Temple there and the authorities want to arrest Him and eventually arrange His death. His relationship with the institutional guardians of His tradition was not an easy one.

[2] He had a number of formative religious experiences in which He felt that God was speaking to Him. The first that we know of was His Baptism which the Gospel writers present as inaugurating His public ministry. It is interesting to notice that scholars seem clear that the words that Jesus heard spoken to Him by God are quotations from two Old Testament passages, one from the Psalms and the other from Isaiah: so God spoke to Him out of the tradition with which He was familiar.

Jesus appears not to know immediately what these words actually meant for Him, and so He withdrew into the Wilderness to reflect on them. The Wilderness is a place with a great deal of symbolic significance for a Jew and Jesus choice of it as a place to go is certainly significant. When Jesus is tempted in the Wilderness by the Devil He answers with quotations from the book of Deuteronomy and in particular from the speech that Moses gave to the Israelites as they were preparing to enter the Promised Land. That too I’m sure is significant. So Jesus sought to interpret the meaning of His religious experiences out of the tradition within which He stood. He recognised the possibility of mis-using and mis-understanding them; and this was a struggle that seemed to stay with Him throughout His life.

Jesus had other religious experiences too. The story of the Transfiguration, which we hear from the viewpoint of the disciples who were there with Him, must have been, first and foremost an experience that Jesus had. Likewise the story of His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Crucifixion. The Gospels give us some insight into what these experiences might have meant to Jesus. But there are other experiences into which they offer us no insight: the Resurrection and the Ascension. It is fascinating to wonder what those events meant to Jesus and how He understood their meaning.

There may well have been others too, of which we are completely ignorant. Perhaps some before His Baptism, as a young man? Maybe others during his times of solitude and prayer during His ministry? We simply don’t know. But the ones we do know about seem to have been formative for Him.

[3] We know that prayer was something that Jesus took very seriously. He taught His disciples the Lord’s Prayer, which reads like a summary of His teaching and presumably reflects His own experience.
He addressed God as His ‘Heavenly Father’ having been addressed by God at His baptism as ‘my beloved son’, and taught His disciples to do likewise.
The use of the Aramaic word ‘Abba’ as the name of God suggests that He taught them to pray to God in their own everyday language rather than in the holy language of Hebrew.
He taught them that their prayer should be brief.
He Himself went off alone to pray, sometimes all night when He must have been mainly silent.

[4] God spoke to Jesus through the everyday events of life. Given that Jesus was well versed in the Jewish Scriptures and its traditions it is surprising that so much of His teaching does not seem to start from them, but rather is drawn from everyday events that everybody must have experienced but few saw the significance of.

The parables that He used are all drawn from ordinary life: a man sowing seed; somebody throwing a party; people working in a vineyard; a shepherd losing one of his sheep; a woman losing a coin; a farmer wondering when to harvest his crops; a decision about where to build a house.

I wonder if these were first of all images that spoke to Jesus about the questions He was asking Himself, before being shared with others? So, for example, I imagine Jesus questioning Himself about the very mixed success of His teaching: there was much initial enthusiasm but much less long lasting commitment. And then He found Himself watching a man sowing seed, and realised that much seed had to be sown in order for a small percentage of it to produce a sufficient harvest: sowing inevitably meant that much would seemingly be wasted. This appeared to be God’s way of doing things. So He shouldn’t worry about measuring the success of His preaching: much would appear to be fruitless; but in God’s good time there would be a sufficient harvest; and He had to learn to trust in that just as the man sowing seed did.

I recall reading the suggestion that the story of the Good Samaritan might well have been born out of Jesus own experience. Maybe He knew from personal experience what it was like to be beaten up and robbed on the Jericho road and to have religious people pass by on the other side, before a man whom He had assumed to be an enemy actually stopped and rescued Him at considerable personal risk. Perhaps this changed Jesus views on who was His neighbour and then was used by Him as a story to illustrate the point to others?

I wonder if the story of His encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman taught His something similar and changed His views on foreigners and on women. I must admit to delighting in the notion that Jesus was taught a lot by God through other people.

[5] God seems to have provided Him with more human support than we might think. It would be easy to imagine Jesus as a lonely figure, and I’m sure that there is some truth in that. His religious experiences singled Him out as different as did His capacity to find God speaking to Him in all sorts of ways and places that nobody else seemed to notice. His willingness to trust in, and to speak from, His own experience of God was not always appreciated and often provoked considerable opposition. He must have been in some ways a solitary man; one who ‘had nowhere to lay His head.’

But this is not the whole picture. He did have followers and supporters. There seems to have been an inner group of three [see my piece on ‘Did Jesus have a spiritual director’]; but there was also a group of Twelve; there were women who supported them; there were individuals like Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, Simon the Pharisee, the man who let Him use his upper room in Jerusalem for the Last Supper; Mary, Martha and Lazarus with whom He stayed. He was regularly sharing meals with others, whether in His own home or theirs. God never seems to have left Him without human support, until the very end, when He found Himself facing a cruel death totally alone.

I sense that all of the above is important because these elements of Jesus spirituality are potentially ours too. We don’t need a complicated system of teaching in order to grow as people and in relationship to God. All we need to do is the follow Jesus’ example.

[1] We all stand in a tradition which shapes our thinking. It may be the Christian tradition and its language and symbolism to which we can go when we try to talk about our life under God. But it may be that we feel ourselves to stand in a tradition which lacks any religious belief or language. There are obvious disadvantages but there is also the plus that we come to these matters with new eyes and a certain freshness. Like Jesus, we can be nourished by the tradition in which we stand, but we will also feel called to challenge it.

[2] Research suggests that nigh on 70% of the adult population of the UK claims to have had an experience of ‘something greater’ than themselves, which many of them would call God, and which is overwhelmingly found to be personally affirmative and encouraging. The problem appears to be not that people lack religious experience, but that they rarely talk about it, perhaps don’t recognise their religious experience for what it is, and often don’t appear to give it the significance it merits. Like Jesus we can recognise it, take it seriously and give it reflective space. Like Jesus we will also be tempted to mis-understand and mis–use it, and can expect to meet opposition when we seek to honour it.

[3] Sister Wendy Beckett wrote that if prayer is important and God is love, then prayer cant in principle be difficult. Jesus makes prayer sound very simple. The majority of people admit to praying from time to time. Again the problem appears to be not that we don’t pray, but that we often don’t attach to it the importance that it merits. Like Jesus we can make time for prayer, time of withdrawal to pray, and a willingness to place our prayer at the centre of our life not its periphery.

[4] Once we have taken on board the Biblical notion that God can speak to us through any and everything, and have begun to watch out for instances of it in our own lives, and then to trust the wisdom we find in them, it is surprising how often they can occur. Like Jesus we can ‘stay awake’ to the God who encounters us in unexpected ways in the midst of ordinary life, and learn to trust the insights that come to us.

[5] Despite the fact that for many the spiritual journey often feels like a lonely one, if we look for a guide it is surprising how often we will find one. As the saying goes ‘When the pupil is ready the teacher will come.’ And in my experience there are always ‘angels’ [messengers from God] along the way who provide support and encouragement from unlikely sources. We are rarely left alone, and when we are we can trust that it is for a purpose. Like Jesus we can learn to accept the support of others, and to stay open to the possibility that our ‘enemies’ may be our greatest teachers.

I have found myself wondering recently if Jesus had a spiritual director, and I have come to the conclusion that He must have. But who might it have been?

I need first to say what I mean by spiritual direction, because I think that we tend to define it much too narrowly. Classically it is understood as a conversation between two people in which one helps the other to recognise God’s presence in their life, and then supports them in responding to it. Today that tends to be a matter of regular meetings every couple of months. But I’m sure that most spiritual direction doesn’t take place like that! My sense is that it most often takes place between people who have never heard of the term, and who have no idea that that is what they are offering each other.

For example, I find it difficult to imagine how you could to be a member of any religious group without being party, from time to time, to conversations of this sort. Indeed, I seem to recall that Ken Leach used to argue that every Christian church will have at least one wise person to whom others informally go to seek advice on spiritual matters. It doesn’t need to be named as spiritual direction for that to be what is happening.

Many of Jesus’ encounters with men and women recorded in the Gospels fit my definition but they seem to have been just one-off meetings. So diaries and ongoing meetings are not obligatory!

I reckon that there’s a strong Christian tradition of spiritual direction being offered in groups. I belong to a couple of such groups, and the old Methodist class system used to work very much in that way I think. So it doesn’t have to be a one to one conversation.

And I think that the majority of church goers get their spiritual direction from the ethos of Sunday morning worship and the collective assumptions of the group, and usually don’t feel the need for anything more personal.

A lady who used to come to me for spiritual direction once told me that she had two spiritual directors. I was a bit taken aback. ‘Yes’ she said, ‘I value coming to talk with you…….but I often simply climb this big hill near our home because God has always felt very real there, and I’ve come to think of the hill as my other spiritual director!’ She taught me that places may act as spiritual directors. Cats and dogs often make good spiritual directors too in my experience, if we will but hear the wisdom that they offer. So human beings aren’t essential either!

So while there is a place for regular one to one spiritual direction conversations, most spiritual direction takes place as a part of ordinary everyday life without anybody thinking that anything special is happening and without recourse to overtly ‘spiritual’ language: such is the graciousness of God.

In this sense Jesus must have been on the receiving end of spiritual direction: how else could He have learned of the Jewish tradition within which He grew up? Somebody must have taught Him? And there surely must have been people to whom He talked as He developed the confidence to trust what He believed the God He came to know was calling Him to? So who might they have been?

You might think of John the Baptist? Tradition talks of them as cousins, and the Gospel assumes that they were ‘family’. But John does seem to have had his doubts about Jesus [Luke 7:18-23] which perhaps casts doubt on their having this sort of relationship?

Mary and Joseph seem more likely candidates. Its difficult to avoid the assumption that as His parents they must at the very least, have influenced His understanding of God.

Simeon, who blessed Jesus as a baby in the Temple, might be a possibility. We tend to think of him as an old man at Jesus’ birth but Luke doesn’t actually say that he was, and so he might well have lived on for some years and maintained a relationship with the growing boy.

What about one of the scholars in the Temple who engaged in discussion with the twelve year old Jesus in a process that might well have been spiritual direction? Maybe that conversation continued over time with one or more of them?

Or might there have been, there surely must have been, a rabbi or senior member in the synagogue back home in Nazareth or Capernaum from whom the young Jesus learnt much about His faith and the scriptures, by osmosis if not by more direct and explicit means. This seems perhaps a likely source of spiritual direction for the growing boy.

But there is another possibility. Kenneth Bailey in “Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes” writes of:
“a lay movement that sprang up in the villages of the Holy Land around the time of Jesus. In any given village, serious-minded Jews would gather and devote themselves to studying the Torah and applying its laws to their day. Everybody ‘kept their jobs’ but spent their spare time discussing the law. We can be confident that Jesus was a part of this group because in the Gospels he demonstrates skills in the rabbinic style of debate such as were nurtured in these fellowships. After those eighteen years of ‘theological education’ Jesus was ready to begin his public ministry.”

Now Jesus early ministry seems to have been based in Capernaum. Mark’s Gospel tells us He called Simon, Andrew, James and John there [1:16ff] He preached in the synagogue there [1:21ff] and then heals Simon’s mother in law in Simon and Andrew’s house [1:29ff] and the same evening heals those who were brought to Him, before going into the hills to pray and then leaving to preach throughout Galilee [1:35ff]. He returns to Capernaum where He was “at home” and heals a paralysed man [2:1-12] He calls Levi to follow Him [2:13f] and shares a meal “in His house” with tax collectors and sinners [2:15-17]. All this takes place in Capernaum. It would make sense to conjecture that Jesus got to know Simon, Andrew, James and John, and maybe even Levi, as members of the Capernaum group of the sort that Bailey describes

And maybe there is even more to this idea? I wonder if there might have been some group spiritual direction available to Jesus? There is no direct evidence for that, but there is circumstantial evidence.
Paul in Galatians [2:9] writes of visiting Jerusalem and there meeting the three pillars of the church who are named as Peter, James and John. Now these three are all from Capernaum, and the Gospels tell us that He invited them to be present at what we now call The Transfiguration and they were with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane too, so they seem to have been singled out. It was Peter who spoke on behalf of the Twelve at Caesarea Philippi and said that Jesus was ‘the Christ of God’, and who was then rebuked when he challenged Jesus for talking of his coming suffering; it was Peter whom Jesus said would betray Him and he did; and it was Peter who recognised the Risen Jesus [John 21:7] It was Peter and John who ran to the tomb on Easter morning [John 20]. It was John who was called ‘the beloved disciple’ [John 13:23]. It was James and John who sought special status from Jesus to the indignation of the other ten disciples and were rebuked by Jesus for doing so[Mark 10:35-45].
So there seems to have been a special relationship between Jesus, Peter, James and John, and Jesus appears to have confided in these three above the others. Might that have involved a degree of mutual spiritual direction which began in a Capernaum study group? All of this is conjecture of course, but I find it intriguing and quite compelling.

Or if we go with the non personal approach then the wilderness seems to have been a place of insight for Jesus, as do the lonely desert places and hill tops to which He seems to have retreated for solitude.

But of course we don’t know anything for sure: there is no hard evidence. Anybody or anything that did serve Jesus in this way has been forgotten of course, which I guess is how it should be.

I met up with my friend Mary Dawson this week at Stixwould. She’s a retired Anglican priest with a spirituality earthed in the everyday, and she was telling me about the way she keeps Sabbath. I found it very interesting, and with her permission I share below two pieces from her blog on the subject. If you’d like to read more of Mary’s wonderings you can find them at http://trundlingthroughlife.blogspot.co.uk/

Fridays

Fridays are very busy in my house as Friday is the day I get ready for Saturday!

Saturday is, for me, the Sabbath. Now I am not Jewish but Sabbath is one of those aspects of Judaism which fascinates me. At the beginning of this year I decided to make Saturday very special, not trying to copy the Jewish Sabbath but making a day to refresh my soul. For me it is a day of withdrawal which I spend alone. Sometimes that just isn’t possible but most weeks I can manage it. And it is very important that my home helps me to feel calm.

So on Fridays I do most of my housework. I am not very good at house work. In fact, let’s be totally honest, I am rubbish at housework. Every couple of months I pay someone else to clean the house through for me and I consider it to be money very well spent. But each week I dash through with a duster and the vacuum cleaner, I replace the flowers and it’s the one day of the week when the bed is sure to be made properly.

I also make sure that I have done the preparation for taking services on Sunday. My quietness tomorrow is not to be spent thinking about what I will say on Sunday.

I plan my meals so that everything on Saturday is really easy. However, Friday evening is often a special meal to start my special day. After my evening meal I will load the bread-maker so that on Saturday I wake to the wonderful smell of baking bread.

And Saturday

Today has been Saturday and has been my Sabbath.

It seems odd really that I value a quiet day so much. I value it more now than ever I did when I was working. It is the day I renew my spirit and listen to God. There is no agenda although there are a few rituals.

The house has to be calm ready for Sabbath. It starts with a special meal. Friday night is not the time for a scrabble in the bottom of the fridge. It’s the time for something carefully chosen which may take more effort than my meals on other days. Yesterday it was a lovely homemade paella. The evening was spent quietly – no TV, just an audiobook and my knitting.

After saying Compline and loading the bread-maker it’s off to bed, and I always turn the bed down early in the evening and leave fresh nightclothes to be enjoyed with my fresh sheets. Often I put flowers in my bedroom too.

Saturday I always wake with a smile on my face. I know it’s going to be a wonderful day. The house smells of fresh bread and the crust is for breakfast. There is no question of a to-do list, I just do things which delight my soul.

My Sabbath has now ended and I still have my smile. I have no family to delight me, my health is not brilliant but there is much to delight in. God is indeed good.

When I travel abroad I like to read a novel or some poetry, look at some art, listen to some music, from the country I am about to visit, to give me a bit of a sense of the culture I will be entering. So when I visited Hungary some years ago I duly read a couple of Hungarian novels in preparation!

Whilst there I mentioned the novels I had read and their authors to a Hungarian friend wondering if she had read them and what she thought of them? She looked at me blankly. She clearly had no idea of whom I was talking about! And then the light dawned. ‘Ah’, she said, ‘she you are giving me their names as if they are English.’ Now it was my turn to look blank.

‘In England you are Henry Morgan, but if you were Hungarian we would know you as Morgan Henry’. Hungary is one of the few languages that does this apparently, putting the surname before the Christian name. The implication is that Hungarians tend to think of themselves as part of a group[s] first and as individuals second. We talked for a while about why this was so, and then, knowing that she had spent some years away from Hungary, I asked her if this made any difference to the practice of spiritual direction.

‘Oh yes’, she said, ‘it makes quite a big difference. When a Hungarian comes to talk they always start by talking about the bigger picture of which they are a part: the state of the world, or their country and its politics, before slowly narrowing the conversation down through their local community, their family, and their work and so on, only talking about themselves right at the end of the conversation if there is time. In England you are more likely to do it the other way around.’

She’s right of course. That is what usually happens in England: its what I usually do. We start by talking about what’s been happening to ourselves and maybe, if there is time, we might reflect on the corporate implications right at the end. Not always of course, there are people who come to talk to me who tend to start with the bigger picture, but most of us don’t.

I’ve tried ‘thinking Hungarian’ as a spiritual exercise and its interesting, because if I start with the bigger picture, then my own stuff falls into a quite different perspective. If I start by reflecting on the state of the world then it may take me some time before I get anywhere near to what’s happening in my own life: compared with those faced by people in the Ukraine, or Syria or Palestine, my problems seem relatively trivial. They remain my issues and the matters I’m having to deal with, but I am now viewing them in a somewhat different light.