Christchurch Parish News, August 2015
A reflection on Paul’s letter to the churches in Philippi: Philippians 4.4-9
Often when I am preparing for the Wednesday evening Bible study at Priory House, I find that a particular verse jumps out at me and just will not let me go. This happened again in June, when one of the passages we were looking at was from Paul’s letter to the churches in Philippi. The passage we were studying in advance of the following Sunday’s Family Service was a well-known section from towards the end of the letter, where Paul writes, ‘Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice’ (Phil 4.4). However, it was not this verse which caught my attention. Rather it was the second half of the verse that immediately follows: ‘The Lord is near.’
Now, during the Bible study, it would not be right for me to steer the conversation so that we solely focus on half a verse of my choosing for 90 minutes! After all, there was lots else in the passage that we all wanted to discuss. But if you are interested to know what kind of personal thoughts and reflections bubbled up whilst I was considering these four words both before and after the study, here they are.
To begin with, I was simply struck by the thought: what if one began from here? What if ‘The Lord is near’ was our starting point in life? But within nanoseconds, all sorts of questions started to pour into my mind. For example, what does ‘near’ mean? Does it mean near physically, as in ‘the vicar was standing perilously near the BBQ’; or does it mean near temporally, as in ‘it’s nearly the choir BBQ’; or does it mean near metaphorically, as in ‘the choristers were near to bursting with with all the burgers and hots dogs they’d eaten’?
What is interesting about all these three questions when we apply them to ‘The Lord is near’ is that in order to ask them and to be able to make sense of the answers we may give, we need to be standing somewhere. We need to be standing on ground that we have confidence in, that we trust. Let me explain in a little more detail what I mean by that.
Underpinning the three questions that immediately jumped into my mind was an element of doubt. Taking the three questions in order, firstly ‘The Lord is near’, meaning physically near. How does one begin to figure out whether or not the Lord is actually physically near? It is not as if we walk around with the spiritual equivalent of a Geiger counter in our hands (or an app on an iPhone!), which enables us to confidently say when standing in one church, ‘Ah yes, the Lord is here. Look, the needle is vibrating excitedly way over to the right, where the label says, “Definitely present!”’; or when standing in another church, ‘No, sorry everybody. The Lord is not here. Look, the needle won’t budge. See? It’s stuck in “Definite absence.”’
No, in order for me to be able to decide confidently that the Lord is or is not near, wherever I may be, I need to be able to trust something, namely my own or someone else’s powers of perception or spiritual discernment. What is curious is that when I place my trust in something or someone to help me decide whether or not the Lord is near, I have actually made that something or someone more foundational in my life than the Lord being near! If I doubt that the Lord is physically near, it is because there is something I trust more in my life, namely my own or someone else’s ability to discern it. There is something other than ‘The Lord is near’ which is my functional starting point at that moment in my life.
So above, when I said that underpinning the three questions was an element of doubt, that was not the whole story. Doubt is not free floating. We doubt from a particular vantage point. Our doubts are rooted in some other solid ground. And if we didn’t trust that somewhere or something, whatever it may be, if we didn’t have confidence that that something was true, functionally true (by that I mean that we actually live out our lives in the light of it, rather than just pay it lip service), then that would be because we had found somewhere or something else in which we ultimately put our trust. Put it like that, it all sounds rather odd. It sounds as if were saying that there is something in our lives which we put our ultimate trust in, which is not the Lord, in order to decide whether or not the Lord is near. We have attributed to something or someone in our lives the property or better yet, the identity that rightly belongs to the Lord.
Before we come to the second question to do with the Lord being near in a temporal sense, let me quickly pause to point out that when Paul speaks of the Lord, there are all sorts of resonances for him and for his listeners. One of the many things that is remarkable about the New Testament is the speed with which its mainly Jewish writers started to use words that hitherto had been used to refer to the God of Israel, to Jesus instead. Their understanding of God’s identity had been turned upside down by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. One of the ways that devout Jews had hitherto referred to the God of Israel was as the LORD. This was because the proper name of the God of Israel was too holy to be actually spoken. The word, the LORD was used instead. So when Paul writes, the Lord, he is saying that the God of Israel and Jesus are one and the same. The identity of the God of Israel is to be understood differently because of this man, Jesus. Extraordinary, eh? OK. Pause over. On we go to the second question.
When we turn to the second way of thinking about ‘The Lord is near’, that of the nearness of the Lord being temporal, I don’t know about you, but immediately I find myself thinking, really? Is the Lord really near, in the same way that as I write this, it’s nearly the summer holidays? Paul’s letter to the churches in Philippi was written nearly 2000 years ago. Can we really say that the Lord is near given that He doesn’t seem to have returned yet? Does holding fast to Paul’s statement in a temporal sense commit us to reading this verse in a way that some might uncharitably characterise as fundamentalist?
(It really does puzzle me when we talk about some people as being fundamentalists. Why? Because we are all fundamentalists. We all of us have our non-negotiable foundations in our lives, in the absence of which they simply become unliveable. It’s like the person who says you shouldn’t draw lines. Well, that person is drawing a line between people who draw lines and those who don’t! The person who disparagingly terms another person a fundamentalist will have in their lives a non-negotiable foundation by which they live and which they cannot prove the truth of, (you can usually tell you have reached it when in an argument they say, ’that’s just the way the world is’ or something like that). We all of us are fundamentalists because we all at heart live our lives by assumptions which are ultimately unprovable. What matters is what we believe in the depths of our hearts. For example, if our unprovable foundational belief is that God is love, that will issue forth, if is a functional belief and not just lip service, in a different kind of life from one rooted in its contrary understanding.)
Perhaps by now, you can already anticipate where I’m going. If we come to the conclusion that the Lord is not near in the temporal sense, that is because we are trusting something more when we come to that opinion. For example, we may have studied the most recent cosmological text books and we now have an understanding that leads us to confidently dismiss the unlikelihood of such a notion. With a universe X billion years old and with Y billion years yet to go, the idea that the Lord is near temporally seems, to put it mildly, most unlikely. It’s more the naive thinking of a pre-scientific age etc.. But in that sequence of thinking, at each stage trust has been placed in the scientific method of our day and our ability to discern the nature of the universe (or universes. as some are now saying!). As such it is a perfectly reasonable position to take. As long as, that is, one recognises that deep down, it is as much a position of trust (faith!) in assumptions that when you work your way back through them are in themselves unprovable. To take but one example: that there is true congruence between our mental faculties and the actual inherent structures of the universe, is a necessary and proper working assumption of the scientific method. But as such it is ultimately, completely unprovable, for how could we disprove it, let alone prove it?
Thirdly, what about ‘The Lord is near’, understood metaphorically? This is, of course, the recourse for those of us who feel rather uncomfortable about holding to the Lord being near in either or both a physical or a temporal sense. Rather than say that this is true in those senses, we instead say that we can understand this verse metaphorically. That is not to say that we don’t actually believe it to be true. After all, metaphors are what we use to speak of true things which lie beyond our normal way of using words (hence so many metaphors for speaking about love… and God!). Rather, it is what we like to flatter ourselves, though we would never like to admit it, as being a more sophisticated, enlightened understanding of such verses from the Bible. To speak of the Lord being near physically or temporally is simply a wonderful metaphor which is straining to articulate a deep spiritual truth, one that is simply beyond words, “Just don’t ask me to explain what I actually understand by it etc.. After all, it’s a metaphor!” And in this way, reading a verse like this as a metaphor is rather like having a Get out of Jail card in Monopoly. It enables us to carry on playing the game rather than getting bogged down in the dungeons of unbelief. But once again, notice what we have done. We have placed our confidence, our trust, in our metaphorical understanding of the Lord being near, which is premised on our own ability to spiritually intuit the whys and wherefores of God. Underpinning this understanding, however, are some rather interesting assumptions on our part about the limitations of God’s self-communicating character (by that I mean God’s ability to accommodate our limited understanding and communicate successfully to us what really matters about God). So, once again, in summary such thinking and reflecting functionally act as a foundation for living that is other than ‘The Lord is near’.
All of which is why I was so struck by the question which came to me when reading this verse from Paul’s letter to those small churches in Philippi (not more than 20 or so people per church, scholars reckon): what would it be like to start instead from ‘The Lord is near’? What would it be like to live our lives with that as the foundation from which and by which we trust, question and doubt everything else in our lives, rather than the other way around. But in a way, that is what the invitation to the Christian life is. And it’s why many of us, especially those of us who did not grow up in the faith, often resist it so vociferously. Because we know that if it’s true, if ‘The Lord is near’ is true, then it, or rather better, He and He alone can be the foundation of our lives. And that changes everything.