Jesus Has Left The Building(s)

When evening came, Jesus left the city.
(Mark 11:19 Christian Community Bible)

This verse is sandwiched between the two halves of the famous story of Jesus cursing a fig tree. The way that St Mark tells it; on the way into Jerusalem one morning our Lord, feeling hungry, sees a leafy fig tree and approaches it. Leaves are all it has however, it not being fig season, so Jesus cursed it saying 'may no one ever eat your fruit.' Then He goes into town and does some stuff. The next morning, the second half of the story, the Apostles and their Master find the tree withered to its roots.

Many people who read this story superficially find it quite disturbing. It seems entirely unreasonable to curse a plant for not producing fruit out of season. It makes Jesus seem like a proto-fast food junkie who can't wait to have things in due time. This would be to misread the episode however, our Lord's action is deeply symbolic and serves an eminently didactic purpose for those who have the key to interpreting it, as of course the first people to hear the Gospels did. It is not at all accidental that this incident occurs in the final week before the Crucifixion nor that He sees the fig tree while approaching Jerusalem.

The fig tree which has leaves but no fruit is an emblem of the religion of the Pharisees and the priests which promises so much but delivers so little, less than nothing indeed, to the people. Jesus approaches the Holy City home of the one Temple of God at the time of the holiest festival in the Jewish calendar hoping to find a nation ready to receive Him as Son of God and Messiah. This nation, and national religion, which God has cultivated lovingly since the time of Abraham will not only, in the person of its leadership elites, refuse to recognise Him but it will actively conspire against Him. This marks the end of that covenant based on the blood that runs through the veins of Abraham's children and its replacement by a covenant founded on the blood that spilled out of the veins of the Christ. The fig tree planted in Palestine will wither, the Cross planted on Calvary will flourish, no one seeking its fruits will be disappointed.

And amid all this symbolism we have the datum that Jesus left Jerusalem to its darkness. During Holy Week He seems to have spent His days in the Temple and, apart from the First Eucharist/Last Supper, his evenings outside of the city. We have no information to tell us why this might have been so. Clearly it did not make Him safe from capture, indeed, Jerusalem was full of Galilean pilgrims had He stayed where they were the authorities would not dared to have touched Him. I think that St Mark by placing the information where he does gives us a clue. Jerusalem has rejected Jesus so Jesus accepts their rejection and leaves them to endure without Him. There was no night worship in the Temple, no vigil services or Vespers, so when the Temple, the House of God, closes Jesus shakes the dust of Jerusalem from His sandals and departs until the House should once again re-open the next day.

Scriptures are not simply a record of history or a repository for symbolism, they speak to the particular condition of each person reading them. This verse tells us that Jesus leaves when darkness descends. This illustrates the doctrine that mortal sin drives Grace out of the soul. Jesus is the light of the world, by Grace He enters our souls and illumines them. But, if He is our guest we can have no other. If we invite into our city-soul greed or envy, anger or lust then darkness descends, evening comes and Jesus departs from the city. We are preparing to crucify Him anew and He accepts our rejection, He has granted us the power to expel Him. Unless we repent, confess and become penitent then our city will remain in the grip of the night, for our power is for our own darkness and our death, our submission is light and life.

It is not only true that Jesus departs when darkness comes to the city it is also true that darkness comes to the city when Jesus departs. The agony known as the Dark Night of the Soul is caused by this departing. Our Lord is a guest in our city-soul and all is light, we invite no others and yet somehow it seems that He has left. We endure emptiness and dryness, torment and temptation and it seems that we do so alone. This is a testing time in the life of a Christian. Our last state appears worse than our first. Then we did not know what we were missing and now we do. Then we were satisfied with shadows, taking them for substance, now we see that they are but empty shapes with no life in them. Our Lord chooses to make Himself present to us in the form of absence, His fullness consists of a void. We can but endure. He is uniting us to His Passion. We cannot fully put off our old humanity and be clothed with Christ until, with Him, we have learned to combine a perfect trust in The Father with the agonised cry of 'My God, My God why have you forsaken me?'

When Jesus comes to our city, or returns to it, there are no more evenings. "The city has no need of the light of the sun or the moon, since God’s glory is its light and the Lamb is its lamp" (Revelation 21:23) When the soul is the abode of our Lord then waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking our city is bathed in light and we are truly alive. Is such happiness possible for humans in this life or can we merely glimpse it from time to time and must we bide our souls in patience until, on entering eternity, we achieve this precious gift of divine union? "A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head." (Revelation 12:1) Never, nor for the merest instant, did Mary cast Jesus out of her city-soul, nor did He cast her out of His. Full of grace means full of light, full of Jesus, no evening covered Mary's city with its shadow. In this she is our pioneer, our role model, our sign of hope. What she achieved she achieved by the grace of  God and by her wholehearted cooperation with it. We can set our hearts to a like cooperation and pray in faith for like graces and by the power of God we too can escape now and forever the power of darkness.

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A Fond Embrace

And taking a child, he set him in the midst of them. Whom when he had embraced, he saith to them:
(Mark 9:35)

This episode is included in three Gospel accounts but only St Mark includes the detail that Jesus embraced the child. It is, indeed, one of the characteristic features of Mark that such little human touches are recorded. For example, in all the accounts of our Lord asleep in a storm tossed boat only this Evangelist tells us that Jesus was "sleeping upon a pillow." (Mark 4:38) Tradition tells us that St Mark was secretary to the Apostle Peter and that essentially his Gospel account is a retelling of the stories which Peter himself first told him. Such little details as this certainly bear the hallmarks of an eyewitness account and the breakneck speed at which Mark rushes through the story with its profusion of 'at once's' and 'immediately's' certainly fits in with the impetuous personality of St Peter that is so vividly described in all four of the canonical Gospels.

However that might be the fact before us is that Jesus embraced the child. We can say that this was a gratuitous act. Had it been necessary to the point He was making then all the Evangelists accounts would mention it. It was unnecessary from the illustrative point of view but, in a sense, necessary from the point of view of a Sacred Heart overflowing with love. That is to say Jesus could not help hugging the child because He who is love Himself cannot act contrary to His nature and Incarnated love embraces a child and does not just use her or him as an instrument for however exalted a purpose. Humans, or indeed any creature, can never be mere instruments in the hands of love and human children least of all. So when Jesus set the child before the Apostles His primary purpose was to teach them a lesson about humility but in thinking about the Apostles He did not forget the child.

The embracing of the child in and off itself is a lesson to us. It teaches us that love must express itself and, moreover, that it must express itself in deeds as well as or instead of words. There is no record of our Lord speaking to the child, though no doubt He did, but there is this description of the embrace. There is an important point too about incarnation. Between Spirit and Matter there is a constant tension. A continuous dwelling upon the weaknesses of the flesh and the superiority of the Spirit could lead us into imagining that all Matter and its needs and desires are nothing but evil, total depravity, and all things of the Spirit are good because partaking of Divinity. Such indeed was the perspective of the various Gnostic heresies, like Catharism, and the idea can be seen to appear at various times within most religious traditions. The Incarnation of the Son of God and Son of Mary, however, means that Matter too now partakes of Divinity, flesh is indissolubly linked to God for all eternity. And so the happiness that the child felt at being embraced and the Love that expressed Himself in embracing that child have no part of evil and constitute undiluted good.

The truths which are taught in the Gospels are timeless but each generation comes to read them through the eyes of their own time. For us, at least in the West, the image of a man hugging a child raises at least subliminally feelings of anxiety. The scandalous abuse of many children by some men, including  ordained pastors, had sent shock waves deep into our consciousness. Reason may tell us that such abusers are few in number and that tactile expressions of love by men towards children are overwhelmingly innocent in intent. But subconscious anxieties are seldom susceptible to reason alone. The horror which we rightly feel at such crimes stirs up an emotion which is linked to an established fact, some men behave in this fashion, and as long as the horror endures so too shall the subliminal anxiety. This is another incarnational fact, humans possess reason but are not purely rational creatures.

 The Church recognises that at times, on the wings of faith, we can rise above reason and soar into regions well beyond its limits. She recognises also that at times, weighed down by fear, we can fall below the level of reason. The response is not, or should not be, to chide and to scold. It is human to fear and to fear excessively is neither fully reasonable nor entirely unreasonable, it is simply human. If our mind accepts the image of Jesus embracing the child for what it is but our heart, in this generation, is troubled or subliminally uncomfortable about it then she proposes an alternative icon. The embrace of Mary is more than merely unproblematic to us it is an illustration of precisely the same point that Mary's Son was making. Overflowing love has and must have and is divinely ordered to have a physical expression. It is common to see images of our Lady embracing the child Jesus, I have one before me as I write this, but that is not the image I have in mind. At the foot of the Cross the Beloved Disciple was given into the care of Mary and he into hers. Who can doubt that they embraced, and which Christian is not a beloved disciple of Jesus? The lesson that Jesus and Mary teach cannot be defiled or befouled by criminal acts nor should we be afraid to proclaim it. Chaste love which does not express itself is incomplete at best and no love at all at worst.


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