John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

The Resurrection - it's all about Mary

The Resurrection - it's all about Mary. My Easter Day offering, introduced with Walter Wangerin's wonderful version of events from The Book of God, the Bible as a novel. Happy Easter, reader.

Saved from Sacrifice

I finished it today, my reading for Lent this year, S. Mark Heim's Saved from Sacrifice, A Theology of the Cross.  That it took me so long to read says something about my slowness when it comes to seriously heavy theological texts - I can't rush them, need to be sure I've properly understood. And especially in this case, Heim's subject being the very delicate area of the precise meaning of Jesus' crucifixion, death and resurrection. Battles have been fought (and all sides lost) over this ground over the centuries. As I mentioned in my blog on 9 March (start of Lent) the book's title 'speaks for its intention, to unmask the sacrificial violence in the biblical witness - scripture's repetition of the deadly cycle of sacrifice present in all human societies and in all religious ritual and myth - and using the approach of Rene Girard, to offer a new theology of the cross'.

It is a tour de force and I'd strongly recommend it. I've got so much from Heim's close readings of Job, Jonah, Susannah, Paul and the Passion narratives which affirm his view that scripture is full of antisacrificial stories, exploded myths, where the victims of scapegoating violence are revealed and the mechanism of sacrifice is thus unveiled and challenged. I was especially taken with his repeated suggestion that whenever we show ourselves to be aware of the mechanics of human sacrifice - bullying, victimisation - it demonstrates that Jesus' gospel work has been done: we have been converted to the point of view which was previously hidden from humanity and which he died to demonstrate (thus saving us from further repetition).

In the light of this, our communal reading of the Passion narratives in Bratton Clovelly and Sourton today spoke a straightforward truth - that the events of what we call Holy Week are the account of a lynching: not a mythical account in support of the sacrifice but a broken account in which the victim has a voice, the perpetrators are portrayed having grave doubts about what they are doing, and witnesses at the foot of the cross make the previously unthinkable claim that the victim is innocent.

This is not mythology - this is a radical new way. Jesus  is treated as all scapegoats are - by a community sacrificing one victim to restore well-being to all. This sort of sacrifice works - but only for a while; it has to be repeated over and over again as violence begets violence, sin crashes into sin. The message of the gospels, Heim says, is that Christ died to put an end to sacrifice, revealed the mechanism and broke the cycle of retribution with his loving reconciliation. Jesus and the Father did not want death - because they are all about life. But this one distinctive act of sacrifice works for all time now. Heim concludes:

The God who paid the cost of the cross was not the one who charged it. We are saved from sacrifice because God suffered it. To be reconciled with God is to recognize victims when we see them, to convert from the crowd that gathers around them, and to be reconciled with each other without them.

I was engrossed by Heim's expose of German National Socialism (whose theologians rewrote scripture to excise its antisacrificial critique and to justify its scapegoating programme)* and Communism (which embraced Christianity's critique of the victim but turned the victims - the oppressed masses, into the victimisers - seeking to defeat the elite in a bloody revolution). This chapter demonstrates that the sacrificial urge in humanity is still strong, that we are in a struggle to convict people of the saving significance of the cross and to release ourselves from the cycle of violence which, despite its defeat at Calvary, still urges to sustain the world.

* more on that subject here.

Can these bones live?

To the man who has just come off the phone to his wife's divorce solicitor, confirming the beginning of the end of his marriage, standing in the wreckage of a relationship gone wrong, God says, 'Mortal, can these bones live?'

To the woman at a window of a mental hospital, staring through her reflection at the outside world which has so damaged her that she fears she can never return there, God says, 'Mortal, can these bones live?'

To the wheelchair-bound patient, looking with his consultant at a set of x-rays of his shattered pelvis, consequence of an accident at work, considering a future of restricted mobility and joblessness, God says, 'Mortal, can these bones live?'

- Can these bones live?, my take on the Ezekiel / raising of Lazarus stories, which I offered (in a variety of forms) to three congregations today.

Learning about farms with the MoD

They're busy up there at the moment, the military on Dartmoor, preparing soldiers for action in the Middle East. They're moving more troops out today, including some of our locals, destination unknown (or maybe classified?), and meanwhile the gunfire on the practice ranges in the hills above us continues on.

Quite unexpectedly, one of the best learning experiences about agricultural life which I've had so far here, came in a presentation based on a conservation project sponsored by the MoD on Dartmoor, by 'cultural environmentalist' Tom Greeves, one-time pioneer of Common  Ground's Parish Maps project (a great influence on my thinking about place) and currently chairman of The Dartmoor Society.

On the MoD's Dartmoor Ranges website they say that

The Ministry of Defence, through Defence Estates’ strategies, has earned an excellent reputation as a steward of its land responsibilities. Conservation is important to Servicemen and women. Understanding cultural heritage, nature, wildlife and farmed stock helps them to live, fight and survive.

Tom's work was to research the histories of two farms on land which the MoD took over, Doe Tor and Bearwalls, and to publish his findings, so that while the farms would inevitably fall into decay and get knocked-around by military exercises, their cultural heritage would be sustained. Nice idea. And Tom's recent presentation to us at Lydford village hall, based on the material he'd gathered (accessible here), was fascinating.

Probably eighty people gathered that evening - including some families who had lived on the farms or farmed that land - and witnessed Tom demonstrate how there are many different ways to look at the history of a farm. What exactly is a farm? - was the question Tom's presentation prompted in me. A farm is a geographical area, a definer - and breaker - of boundaries; it's a mixture of earths and soils and grasses and trees. A farm is a house and a collection of outbuildings which may appear randomly placed but were probably put there for good reasons (which it is the investigator's joy to reveal). It's a multitasking workplace. It's an animal centre. And most of all, perhaps, a farm is a home, and the shells of the Doe Tor and Bearwalls buildings are receptacles of family histories as deep and profound as any described by National Trust guidebooks of gigantic country mansions.

So, what exactly is a farm? - a fascinating question; and guided by the approach of Tom (and of other local people who have dedicated time and energy to revealing the stories of the people and places of our area), I will enjoy unearthing the answers to it, on the ground, with the people of these parishes, as time goes on