The Presence in the Absence
Easter 5 : 18 May 2014 : John 14: 1-12
Father Hugh Bowron, 2013The decision by the Emperor Constantine to convert to Christianity had major repercussions, not just for the Roman Empire, but also within his own family. His mother Helena took to the new religion like a duck to water, and soon made a major project out of it. Travelling to the holy land she initiated a series of digs and discoveries of places that figured prominently in the earthly life of Jesus. His birthplace, the site of his execution, and so on, were now confidently announced to the public as suitable places for pilgrimage and devotion. This was a new development. Christians had not thought it important to visit or reflect on the geographical living space of Jesus before. So began a great pilgrimage and tourism industry that has grown and grown right up to the present day. It has also had a considerable impact on history, motivating both the Crusades, and also the start of the Crimean war, since this was in part a row about whether the eastern of the western churches had jurisdiction over certain holy places.
Perverse creature that I am I have never had the slightest desire to visit the holy land. It has always seemed to me that if the Christ event means anything at all then its significance and its story has to be played out in the time and place and space of each Christian. But I am interested in the reasons why other people get such a charge out of visiting the places where Jesus lived and died.
Perhaps what is going on here is that faith in invisible realities is a big ask for a lot of people, and having a physical and geographical frame in which to insert the gospel story makes it come alive for them. They are clinging as it were to the trappings of Jesus’ life, the left behind details and locations of his earthly existence, in the same way that grieving people find that objects dear to the departed person bring something of their presence back to them.
The poet R S Thomas was an Anglican priest who spent most of his ministry in rural Welsh parishes. In the poem "No Time" he grieves for his wife who has died after 50 years of a good marriage. He finds she turns up in brief, unexpected moments:
She left me. What voice
colder than the wind
out of the grave said
"It is over?" Impalpable,
invisible she comes
to me still, as she would
do, and I at my reading.
There is a tremor
of light, as of a bird crossing
the sun’s path, and I look
up in recognition
of a presence in an absence.
Not a word, not a sound,
as she goes her way,
but a scent lingering
which is that of time immolating
itself in love’s fire.
That phrase "a presence in an absence" helps me to understand what Jesus was talking about in those words we just listened to. Jesus is preparing the disciples for how things will be when he is gone. Though physically absent he will be with them in a different and more useful way. In fact they will be able to do even greater things than he did because he will be with the Father.
In another part of John’s gospel Jesus talks about sending the Comforter who will be with the disciples in a powerful and influential way when he is gone. He didn’t mean that the Holy Spirit would be the comfy one whom they could snuggle up to, and feel warm and cosseted. Instead the Comforter creates the presence in the absence, the risen Christ now universally available, a vivid presence in the faith experience of the generations of Christian believers who would come after. It is the Comforter who has given me a sure sense of deep faith since my early teens. That is why I feel no need to, or interest in, visiting the holy land.
When we think about what it means to do greater works than Christ did we can call to mind those amazing Christians like Francis of Assisi, who was described by some as a second Christ. But sometimes these greater works are played out in a more low key way as people struggle with the difficulties and tragedies that are the lot of many peoples lives.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was Russia’s greatest novelist of the 19th century. His deeply held Christian faith helped him to survive and overcome exile in Siberia, a mock execution that drove one of his fellow prisoners around the bend, and a compulsive gambling addiction. Towards the end of his life, particularly after the success of his novel The Brothers Karamazov, many people began to treat him like a latter day prophet, and consulted him about their life difficulties. His advice could be pretty astringent. A woman wrote to him of her persisting unrest because of her doubts about eternal life. "Remain in your unrest," he wrote back, "seek further–it may be that you will find." Dostoevsky was clear about the importance of patience and of waiting, and about the need for struggle as part of the process of finding spiritual enlightenment. As he wrote in another place, "The truth is that my faith in Christ and my proclamation of my faith is not that of an infant: my hosanna has passed through a furnace of doubts." The greatest literary character that Dostoevsky created is Fr Zosima, a spirit filled man who exhibits great spiritual freedom. He too gives no glib answers or saccharine assurances. To a peasant woman who is weeping bitterly for her dead child he says, "And do not be comforted; you should not be comforted. Do not be comforted but weep." He knew that we honour the dead by our grieving, and that our grief has its seasons and its times, and cannot be rushed in our working through of it.
In the week ahead we might like to reflect on, and pray about, the way we experience the presence in the absence. God strews clues about his presence in our lives before us in our ordinary living, and hopes that we will join the dots up, and acknowledge that he is with us in all our days. We don’t have to travel to Israel to connect up with him, and to make him come alive in our faith experience. His resurrection released him to be available to all people in all times and in all places, even here at the bottom of the world. And even in testing times, and difficult life situations, which have no quick resolutions or easily available comfort, he is with us, as the presence in the absence.
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