‘Jesus wept.’
St. John’s Gospel 11:35
The Christian calendar often seems so compressed into these six months between Advent and Pentecost that all the traditions don't give us much time to dwell on the divine perspective. There is, of course, an additional six months to focus on the teaching of Christ in the four gospels, which merit every bit as much attention as Christmas and Easter; but church attendances are concentrated around these two main festivals and suggest that is not the case so far as they are concerned.
As Richard Hooker said over 400 years ago, it takes logic as well as tradition and scripture to understand the divine perspective. For example, for me it was the tragedy of the Indian Ocean tsunami which sealed my understanding that creation could not have resulted in delivering a perfect world in a fixed time, whether seven days or longer. The immense tragedy and massive suffering from purely natural causes such as the moving of the earth's tectonic plates is not perfection. St. Paul clearly understood this: he wrote in one of his letters that the world was ‘groaning in creation’.
Also, St John tells us that the nature of the conscious creator — that is, God — is love, and it’s our clear understanding that this unconditional love is alongside us in all our woes and disasters, whether they result from human or cosmic causes. That cannot be consistent with the concept of a finished creation embedded with natural imperfections. Evolution is therefore wholly consistent with the Christian faith in my view.
Love also calls for direct experience of relationships, and therefore it is entirely logical that the conscious creator should experience life alongside us in human form. That’s what we believe Jesus did two thousand years ago, conveying as much of the nature of the divine perspective as we are able to take in. Christians believe that Jesus Christ was our conscious creator visiting us in person, and it's what the word ‘Emmanuel’ — God with us — means.
My favourite hymn over Christmas is what is known as the Liturgy of St. James, and it starts with the line ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’. It's one of the few hymns which lets us see the journey from the spiritual to the human, from a divine perspective.
We don’t know much of the story of Jesus’s childhood, but there is the part where he stays behind at the temple in Jerusalem at the age of 12 to listen to and debate the human perspective on religion at that time. His explanation to his parents shows no doubts about his role, even at that early stage.
With adolescence behind him, we next find him confirming that purpose in those forty days in the wilderness; once again, with no doubt about his calling.
But perhaps one of the most explicit examples of his divine perspective was the circumstances which gave rise to our very short opening quotation, ‘Jesus wept’. This was shortly before the momentous Passion Week, and it involved a family who Jesus particularly appreciated: that of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Jesus was given warning of Lazarus’s illness and was fully aware of his imminent death, but the detailed account in St. John’s gospel makes it clear that he deliberately held back so that he could demonstrate his divine power to restore the dead man to life.
Many interpret this phrase ‘Jesus wept’ as evidence of his compassion for the family — and there’s no doubt he felt that in abundance. But I suspect that this is one of those very rare situations when his very genuine remorse was the result of having to be the cause of such distress for a family of which he was so fond, in order to prove his divine capability in raising someone from the dead.
It is a powerful story, and well worth reading in detail.
One of the last gospel insights into the divine perspective is from Jesus’s prayer following the Last Supper, just hours before his crucifixion. This was again recalled by John.
In my view, John was the deepest thinker of all Jesus’s disciples, and really understood the divine perspective. He was the person who realised that the nature of God, our conscious creator, is love: something that not even those ancient Christian theologians who put together the Nicene Creed 1,700 years ago managed to recognise (see our commentary on 8th December last year).
The divine outlook on humanity must be somewhat depressing, to say the least. Here we are, two thousand years after Jesus walked as a human on this earth, and we are still beset by wars: in fact, both of the major conflicts at the current time were started by nominal Christians: Putin and Trump. So much for ‘love your enemy’.
A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to the 'Aliens: Are We Alone?' episode of Brian Cox’s 'Adventures in Space and Time' on the search for life elsewhere in the universe, and he observed that, even if life exists elsewhere, it's highly unlikely that there could be intelligent life on any other planet among the over 100 billion stars in our own galaxy: largely because humanity is showing itself as incapable of maintaining its existence for more than the blink of an eye in cosmic time.
Perhaps this is also why Jesus spoke so clearly of the need to be born again in spirit when he met with Nicodemus.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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