We sort of slipped into the time we are in. We were born, and then, just by virtue of remaining alive, we have arrived here, and it is sad and frightening and dangerous. Even we who expected exactly this — we saw it in our nightmares well before — our minds can’t take it all in. Even though it doesn’t surprise us, we’re still shocked by the betrayals all around us. Our mental health is affected; it’s on the edge. And it’s not just you, nor just me. People all around us are feeling it.
“Just as it is written — ‘I’m sending my messenger ahead of you …’ — John came.” These words are the beginning of Mark’s gospel. John the Baptist came because he was supposed to; the timing wasn’t by accident.
“Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of
Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of
Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, in the high-priesthood of Annas and
Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias …” (Luke 3:1-2)
Luke is being so precise. John is a grownup at this point, but Luke is very clear that his birth and his coming onto the public stage did not happen at just any old arbitrary time but at precisely THIS moment of history, the moment when he DID come, a moment located in terms of politics and society.
Perhaps we too came into the world and lived the lives we have lived precisely for the times in which we lived them. More to the point, perhaps we were born precisely for this time in history, an awful time in which none of us knows how the end will turn out.
But why? Why have I lived long enough to be here NOW? No matter how much we shout and protest, we have a feeling of powerlessness, that even our words are being collected by a sinister force to be turned against us later. Algorithms and bullies crowd us out, even erase us. Or we are targeted.
Maybe we’re called to do big things. Maybe not. Maybe the little things we do are bigger than we know.
“Jesus Christ … the faithful witness” (Revelation 1:5); “the faithful and true witness” (Revelation 3:14). Did you know that the word “martyr” (μάρτυς) is the same as the word “witness” in the language of the New Testament? The words μαρτυρία and μαρτύριον mean witness, testimony, evidence, or proof. We were sent here to this time — all of us — to be faithful and true witnesses, witnesses to Jesus in the little way of Francis and Clare. It does not sound like much but look at Jesus whom we follow. He was betrayed by a friend at night, framed unsuccessfully by the high priest and his coterie overnight, handed over to the Roman governor who, letting a mob decide his fate, had him executed early in the morning — without a trial — before most of his followers even knew he had been arrested. The injustice! But he was a faithful and true witness. “You are my son, the beloved. With you — your being in the world — I found — in the world — what pleases me.”
To be a faithful witness means living an ordered life. Not a haphazard one subject to every wind of influence, but one rooted in values. These values are cultivated and ingrained in us through practice and meditation and osmosis until they become habituated. We immerse ourselves into the gospels and the gospels into ourselves so that Jesus, who inhabits their pages, gets habituated into us. We become what he is. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” says the apostle (Philippians 3:12).
This is not something we do, but that the Spirit does within us: “For it is God who operates in you both the willing and the working for [God’s] good pleasure” (Philippians 3:13).
There is a groove when we are working with the Spirit and the Spirit is working with us and we are in accord — however stormy and rocky the journey — and all is according to the resurrected Jesus who is living into us and out of us by the presence of the Spirit. We live in the world, then, with the Spirit of Jesus whose voice we have learned to recognize and follow.
Living in this world, then, we live close to heaven under an open heaven, not fretting about our pennies in the bank, but living like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. Jesus lived by trusting the Father completely and committing himself completely into the Father’s hands. I don’t like the use of patriarchal language for the Divine, preferring to think of the Divine as Mother, like the old Israelite deity, El Shaddai, but be that as it may, Jesus frequently talked about living in the sight of the Beloved Parent as though nothing else mattered, not anyone else’s approval or disapproval, their threats or even their violence. He calls us to live before the Divine, not before the world, trusting — entrusting ourselves — entirely to the Divine, and to live as though that is our only reality — because it is. The so-called reality constructed by our milieu is just a detached bubble, exceedingly partial in ways we can’t even imagine.
This complex, unpredictable, frightening, and violent time is a good time (kairós) to become a simple Christian like one in the early days of our faith, who in poverty of spirit and of things, humbly follows Jesus in the little way of the gospels, loving generously with two open hands (not with one clenched behind our back), following Jesus on the way of the cross. Now is a good time to live by our principles and rule, dig deep into the Gospel of our Lord Jesus the anointed son of God, and be a faithful and true witness (martyr).
Perhaps as we set ourselves in order — “Order my footsteps in thy word; and so shall no distortion have dominion over me” (Psalm 119:133) — with time the Spirit will return our wits and restore our humanity.