A Sermon, written for the Internet series of weekly sermons by Dominicans, for the 31st Sunday of the Year: C. The Scriptural texts were Wisdom 11:22-2:2; Thessalonians 1:11-2:2 and Luke 19:1-10.

These are the kinds of questions that should jostle for attention in our minds as we consider today’s gospel. And yet at first sight the story of Zacchaeus up a tree could well seem just a charming and picturesque Oriental tale, told to make the simple point that Jesus leaves nobody out.

Dwell a little longer on those questions that float in and out of our consciousness as we begin to reflect on the gospel. To read the Scriptures in the Christian assembly as part of the liturgy is not the same kind of activity as reading them alone at home. To start with, the Sunday readings are selected and combined for us. We come to the gospel story about Zacchaeus only after we have taken in the reading from the book of Wisdom. That first reading already releases large questions and cosmic issues into our consciousness:

So, back to the gospel. Consider what might have been that day in Jericho.

Watch any of the world’s great sporting events and you are likely to see carefully placed placards with the simple message ‘John 3.16’, drawing our attention to the heart of God’s good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. That God’s own Son became a human being, died a human death on the cross and was raised from the dead ‘for us and for our salvation’ is the core of any truly Christian faith. But what does it mean to be ‘saved’, and how was — and is — that salvation achieved?

‘Save’ and ‘salvation’ are increasingly common words. A goalkeeper who makes ‘great saves’ is seen as the ‘salvation’ of a soccer club facing relegation. There are even governments of ‘National Salvation’. We are persistently urged to save the whale, our planet — and our money! It is not too difficult to grasp this use of the words, but it is often another matter altogether when it comes to salvation in its deepest, richest and ultimate sense.

In theological circles ‘salvation’ is but one of many different words for what God is offering humanity, each with its own nuance of meaning. Some prefer ‘redemption’, ‘justification’, ‘liberation’, ‘divinisation’ or another. But for ordinary English-speaking Christians, ‘save’ and ‘salvation’ are still the usual words for expressing something which we recognise lies at the very heart of our faith.

The mystical language of the 14th century Dominican, Meister Eckhart, can certainly be characterised as daring in its creativity. Indeed, Eckhart uses language like few others in his talk of the divine, employing bold paradoxes and unusual metaphors. But as Bernard McGinn has written, “while Eckhart’s creative handling of language is one of the major attractions of his style, it often does not make the task of understanding him any easier.” Part of the problem in failing to understand Eckhart’s words involves a failure to understand the context of his theological vision and his efforts to bring his listeners to a new appreciation of the divine. This has been especially true in the contemporary philosophy of religion. Philosophical analyses have failed to attend to the conditions in which the mystic’s words have their meaning and instead have generally been attempts to “penetrate” the phenomena. What is required instead is what the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has advised, namely, a grammatical investigation. When Eckhart writes, “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye and one sight and one knowing and one loving”, it must be recognized that the meaning of such a statement can only be understood in seeing how Eckhart’s words are being used, for it is only in this context that these words have their significance. Rather than impose a philosophical explanation, therefore, it is important to note the grammar of Eckhart’s discourse and thus a description is offered.

In the Beginning

Perhaps I should begin by saying that the origin of this paper lies in the discussion of the North European diffinitors when they met last year to begin thinking about this General Chapter. We met in Edinburgh, one of the most northerly houses of the Order in Europe, in October as the all-enveloping darkness of a Scottish Winter began to make itself felt, and in a city known for its particularly gloomy Calvinist establishment. So perhaps there was a certain inevitability about our finding this topic. What I want to say is partly drawn from our conversations in Edinburgh, and from our correspondence with each other since then, and partly from the depths of my own sense of mortality.

I suppose we should also take into consideration the fact that one of the provinces represented at that meeting, Flanders, doesn’t have a single novice or brother in formation at present, and has had no ordination for two years. Only two men have been professed there in the last 25 years. Houses are closing, projects are dying. The Dutch province also has its difficulties: having had 600 members in 1957, it now has about 190, and most of these are old men. One novice was professed three years ago, and now they are asking themselves whether they can receive any more. They have had to sell the Albertinum, one of their major historical projects. It’s hardly surprising that the Dutch diffinitor, Ben, asks “Are we coming to the end of religious life?” This is certainly the impression given in some parts of the world.

There is widespread public anxiety about the effects of nuclear radiations, particularly concerning the cases of childhood leukaemia near nuclear plants. Seven cases occurred in Seascale in Cumbria near the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield from 1955 to 1983. This number seemed to be much greater than would be expected by chance, and received much publicity. It was, however, very difficult to understand how these cases could be blamed on Sellafield, since the amount of nuclear radiation released is far smaller than the natural background.

A possible mechanism was suggested in 1987 by Gardner, who postulated that the children developed leukaemia as a result of their father’s exposure to nuclear radiation. He collected statistics that showed a significant correlation between paternal radiation dose and leukaemic children. This led to several Court cases in which families sought compensation from British Nuclear Fuels, the company operating the plant.

The Gardner hypothesis has such serious implications for the nuclear industry that many further investigations were made. These were on the actual process whereby paternal irradiation could lead to childhood leukaemia, the observations of leukaemia in the children of survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan, and more extensive studies of leukaemia around nuclear plants. The results of these studies have now been summarised by Sir Richard Doll, Dr H.J.Evans and Dr S.C.Darby in Nature (367.678.1994). They conclude that the Gardner hypothesis is wrong.

The possibility that nuclear irradiation could cause a gonadal mutation leading to childhood leukaemia can be studied using data on genetically-determined leukaemia. The detailed statistical knowledge shows that there may be a recessive mutation that could contribute to a number of observed cases.

What makes a “Christology” count as a “Christian” Christology? Evidently, there is some distinction to be made. Presumably the reverent accounts of Jesus’ person and role offered by Islam, by notable non-Christian Jews of modem times, by Jewish writers such as Vermes, or by Gandhi and others in the Hindu tradition, do not count as “Christian” Christologies — and clearly a respectful account of his person and role offered by an agnostic or atheist could not count as a “Christian” Christology. Whether we situate the sentimental nineteenth century Renan, or modem theologians such as Maurice Wiles’ and John Hick, on the “Christian” or “non-Christian” side of the divide in respect of their Christologies, waits upon some clarification of what it is that makes a Christology a “Christian” one.

The term “Christology” does not mean a “Messianology” which would have to do with the role of a Messiah the question of whose identity lies open. Rather it means what would have better been called a “Jesuology”, that is an account of the person and role in human existence and the universe of the historically identified person, Jesus of Nazareth.

I

Blessed and cursed by a peculiar “hopelessness,” Christians claim fellowship with Christ who suffered outside the city gate, and are called to follow him into that wilderness beyond the camp, that region other than the earthly civitas, from which we might discern another city. This other city shows the structures of this world, which seem so solid and so real, to be afflicted with an ephemeral quality, a kind of unreality, so as to make them a source of anxiety rather than a resting place for our restless hearts (Lk. 12: 12-34.)- And so we exist in a state of perpetual pilgrimage to our true patria, following “Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2).

We use the word figure in many ways. We speak of figure-skating, of cutting a figure, of a fine figure of a man, the fuller figure, a figure of fun, figuring things out, figures of speech and being good with with figures. These are all current senses. In the past, figure has had other meanings. When, in The Merry Wives of Windsor Mistress Ford encourages Mistress Page to ‘scrape the figures out of your husband’s brains’, she does not mean that he has been worrying about the mortgage, but that his head is full of mistaken ideas or fantasies.

Figure comes from the Latin figura. In 1944 the German literary critic Erich Auerbach published an influential article entitled Figura. He showed the wide range of meanings that figura has in classical Latin, and how these developed further in Christian usage. Fran the earliest records, figura could mean ‘the shape of a thing’, just as we now speak of a person’s ‘figure’. But it could also mean a shape representing something else. Sculptors, for instance, make figurae of human beings; in our dreams we see figurae of people who are dead.

Christian writers developed this second sense in a new and important way. For them, figura could refer to an object or event belonging to a particular point in time that represented something in the future. For Tertullian, Isaac, Joseph, Moses are all figurae of Christ2; the marriage of Adam and Eve is a figura of Christ and the Church3 (Theologians are familiar with this way of looking at history, though we usually call it by a word of Greek origin, typology.)

If you are keen to visit old buildings, some of the best examples of medieval ecclesiastical remains are to be found in East Anglia. On a recent visit I had occasion to spend some time church crawling and stumbled across Binham Priory, the remains of a Benedictine monastic settlement 4 or 5 miles from Walsingham. Why this place sticks firmly in my mind is the stark contrast between what now exists and what had been. Apart from the monastic ruins, the only utilised building (apart from a farm) is the nave of the church. The poignancy of juxtaposition makes the place special, a holy place in the sense that it has a continuity with the past and also a sense of dramatic personal history; it seems to have been a building that moved with the times as the different styles of architecture and furnishing show, but its truncated nave and aisles, gives the impression of a magnificent church built for monks and people in a remote place. Its setting is typically East Anglia, the rear approach is through a gatehouse, ruined, and then a paved way, into the door to face a magnificent medieval seven sacrament font, benches with carved figures on the poppy heads, the old holy water stoop, and a fine tapestry behind the Jacobean table altar.

I use Binham as an example of what one could call the ‘sacrament of building’, a place which engaged and still engages people with a transformative presence. This might be fanciful language but it hints at the importance of place and ritual in the context of human life.

Scepticism has frequently been associated with authoritarianism both in politics and in religion. Those who have emphasised the limitations and fragility of human reason have needed to look elsewhere for a basis for certitude—some solid foundation to support a viable political or religious system. Few sceptics have been prepared to accept the view that knowledge and certitude are impossible; there is indeed something paradoxical about the very assertion. Although I shall refer to Lamennais as a sceptic, he firmly rejected pyrrhonism—for he believed that certitude is possible at least in some matters. Nor did he say that reason, or empirical knowledge (arrived at through sense experience) is useless, though he did emphasise the limits of these human faculties, stressing their dependence upon faith and authority.

Lamennais’s life and writings raise questions of perennial importance both for theology and for political philosophy. What is the nature of authority? How are claims to authority legitimated? Are there any independent criteria by which to judge the decisions of political or religious authorities, if so how are they constituted? If custom and tradition are ultimate, does this imply ethical relativism? Can one ethnic group or religious party which happens to wield power (for example the British in nineteenth-century India, or Calvinists in sixteenth-century Geneva) justifiably impose its ideas of right and wrong on those of a different tradition.

In 1920 Father Bede Jarrett, then provincial of the English Dominicans, wrote to a friend saying that he had just bought the Catholic Review for the province. The Catholic Review was a quarterly journal edited first by Father Benedict Williamson and then by Father Henry Rope. The new publication was to be called Blackfriars. In the view of its first editor, Father Bernard Delany OP (1890-1959), Father Bede had wasted the forty pounds he had paid for it since the journal was defunct and there was to be only a notional continuity between it and the one that was to replace it. In purchasing the title Father Bede was fulfilling a long-cherished ambition to establish a Catholic periodical which would express a specifically and characteristically Dominican voice in England.

As early as 1910 a similar project had been mooted by Father Hugh Pope OP (1869-1946), a celebrated apologist and exegete who had taught at the Dominican house of studies in Hawkesyard, Staffordshire, but who was then teaching Scripture at the Angelicum, the Order’s Roman university.’ In the Hawkesyard Review, an in-house journal mostly edited by the Hawkesyard students, Father Hugh argued the case for a Dominican review suggesting that, in the contemporary world, it would be a sign of the Order’s commitment to the ministry of the Word. In the midst of the Modernist crisis, whatever Scripture scholars wrote was of interest to those in higher authority and was often carefully scrutinised. It was for this reason that Pope’s article in an obscure English Dominican publication with a tiny circulation attracted the attention of the Master of the Order, Father Vincent Cormier (1832-1916).