Читать книгу Living in Love and Faith - Bishops of the Church of England - Страница 13

We began with God’s gift of life in creation. It is a gift God reaffirms, renews and restores through the work of redemption in which everything that came to spoil the good in creation is redeemed in Jesus Christ.

It is a gift that shall be fully known at the end of time as we know it, when God’s purposes are fulfilled. Yet it can be experienced now in a real and tangible form.

This gift of life is given and received in and through many kinds of relationship: ways of togetherness, with God, with each other, and with the whole created order. God’s gift of life brings life – it brings us to life. And because we are made in the image and likeness of the God of life, this gift makes us life-givers. Through our gift of life we bring life to the world as we relate to other people and take up our responsibilities to the whole community of creation.

The gift of life that is given and received through relationship is a gift of love. God loves us into life and calls us to live life in love. To love God and be loved by God, to love others and to let others love us, to love this creation of which we are part and to receive God’s love through it, is at the heart of what it means to dwell with God and to be indwelt by God.

When Jesus was asked a question about marriage he spoke about ‘the beginning’ (Matthew 19.8). He rooted marriage in the characteristics of God’s gift of life in creation. God’s gift of love, the gift that brings us life in God’s likeness, enables us to share life with others and to give life to others. We will reflect more on what this might mean in relation to marriage in the next chapter. But for now it is important to see the sharing of life in love – we might call it mutuality – and the bringing of life through love – we might call it fruitfulness – are also to be found in other forms of relationship and human connection.

Jesus was not married, neither was he a parent, but he lived his life with others in mutuality and fruitfulness. He lived with his mother Mary – whose ‘spirit rejoices in God’ (Luke 1.47) because of the gift of her child – and Joseph and the family that grew up around them, along with the people of the towns and communities in which they lived. In adult life, Jesus gathered a community of disciples around him who travelled with him, sharing their lives together. There were many other relationships too, beyond those circles of formative companionship, some of them ready to receive life from Jesus, others determined to take life from him.

We too live our lives in an array of relationships, some of them, especially those made possible by the mobility and technology of modern life, unimaginable in Jesus’ time. And in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic this technology, despite its limitations, proved to be a lifeline for many during the lockdown periods that were imposed. At the same time intimacies of touch, mobility across small as well as great distances, and the ordinary closeness of gathering, were all marked by a danger we were not aware of before. This loss of physical connectedness that the lockdown imposed heightened our longing for it.

In different degrees, many of our relationships are marked by mutuality and fruitfulness. We are bound together in ties of family, friends and neighbours, companions, colleagues and those with whom we share a common purpose. These relationships shape our lives and through them we affect the lives of others and, in some genuinely creative ways, the world around us. We face each other bearing the scars caused by the absence of love, yet through the exchange of truth about ourselves, which is the gift of stable and more long-lasting relationships, we are given the chance to heal what has been hurt. The greater our commitment to the constancy of loving, on which such mutuality ultimately depends, the greater the fruitfulness in lives freed to ‘look not to [their] own interests, but to the interests of others’ (Philippians 2.4).

One form of togetherness, one that underlies the sorts of life-bringing relationships we are describing here, is friendship. Friendship is close to the heart of God’s work. God calls Israel the one ‘I have chosen’ and ‘the offspring of Abraham, my friend’ (Isaiah 41.8). God speaks to Moses ‘face to face, as one speaks to a friend’ (Exodus 33.11).

Jesus speaks words of friendship to the people he meets, describes qualities of friendship in his parables, reaches out to those estranged from society, becoming known as ‘a friend of tax collectors and sinners’ (Luke 7.34), bringing people to the deepest truth about themselves. A new community of friends forms around Jesus (John 15.15). ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down his life for his friends’, Jesus tells his disciples (John 15.13) as he sends them ‘to bear fruit, fruit that will last’ (John 15.16). When one of their number approached him in a threatening crowd ‘with swords and clubs’ (Matthew 26.47) on a dark night of betrayal, Jesus called out to him ‘Friend, do what you are here to do’ (Matthew 26.50). Standing at the foot of his cross, when many other friends of Jesus had scattered, Mary, Jesus’ mother, and ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ (John 21.20), were bound together in a new family of mutual comfort and enduring support. After Jesus’ resurrection, when the Spirit of Life had come upon them and the rest of Jesus’ company of friends, they shared words of life with those to whom they were sent and, through their common life and actions, drew people from many places into this life of friendship with God.

Some of Jesus’ friendships seem to have had a physical intensity about them. There is ‘one of his disciples – the one whom Jesus loved’ (John 13.23) reclining very close to Jesus (the King James Version says, ‘leaning on Jesus’ bosom’) as Jesus speaks to his followers of the betrayal he will soon endure. There is Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus, who poured costly oil over Jesus’ feet, wiping them with her hair, preparing him – as Jesus told those shocked at the extravagance, emotional and financial – for his burial (John 12.1-8). In happier times, she also sat near to him, listening intently to every word he spoke (Luke 10.39). And there is the other Mary, of Magdala, who did not abandon Jesus but stayed near his cross watching him die. The first to arrive at his tomb, distraught that his body is gone, she weeps over his grave. Even angels cannot console her (John 20.1,11-18).

We hear of other close friendships and relationships in the biblical story where fierce loyalty and fearless devotion between two people speak of the God ‘abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’ (Exodus 34.6). ‘Deal kindly with your servant’, says David to Jonathan, ‘for you have brought your servant into a sacred covenant’ (1 Samuel 20.8). Jonathan replies, ‘If I am still alive, show me the faithful love of the Lord’ (1 Samuel 20.14). Jonathan loves David ‘as he loved his own life’ (1 Samuel 20.17). Jonathan steps into danger, ready to lay his life down for his friend. As they part, ‘they kissed each other, and wept with each other’; and ‘David wept the more’ (1 Samuel 20.41). Ruth, the Moabite, clings to Naomi, her mother-in-law, refusing to be parted from her. Famine had driven Naomi and Elimelech from Bethlehem to Ruth’s land beyond the Dead Sea. Now the death of her husband and sons sends her back to Bethlehem. ‘Do not press me to leave you or turn back from following you!’, says Ruth, vowing to her ‘where you die, I will die – there will I be buried’ (Ruth 1.16,17). She determines that her life will be bound to Naomi’s, that the one shall protect and preserve the other.

For more about Ruth and Naomi, see Chapter 11, here-here. For further discussion about friendship, see Chapter 5, here-here; and for a discussion about the friendship of Jonathan and David see Chapter 9 here-here.

In the early centuries of the Church, all of these biblical examples, the example of Jesus’ community of friends, and supremely Jesus’ own example, inspired the rise of monastic communities. Men and women covenanted themselves to communities of Christian friendship, exploring intense experiences of togetherness in different forms of common life. ‘The Pastoral Prayer’ of Aelred, the Cistercian Abott of Rievaulx in the twelfth century, shows how his life was given over to a community of people and how his one concern was the good of those whom Christ had ‘appointed this blind guide to lead’. He desired ‘to be subject to them in humility’ and ‘always one of them in sympathy’. And so he prayed:

You know my heart, O Lord;

whatever you have given to your servant,

it is my will that it be bestowed upon them in its entirety

and entirely used up for their benefit.

Through your indescribable grace, O Lord,

grant me patience in supporting their weaknesses,

compassion in my love for them,

and discernment in helping them.

Let me learn, let your Spirit teach me,

to console the sorrowing,

to strengthen the fainthearted,

to set the fallen upright,

to be weak with the weak,

to be indignant with the scandalized,

to become all things to all people

in order to win them all.3

Patterning himself on Jesus’ life of love and service, Aelred committed not only to live with others throughout his life but to devote himself to the fulness of their lives, so that together they would become a community of love, and be at peace with God and each other. For this peace, as Augustine said, ‘is perfectly ordered and wholly concordant fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of each other in God’.⁴

We see that sort of enjoyment of God and others supremely in Jesus who, according to modern definitions, was single. In a culture where marriage was almost mandatory, as a religious responsibility and a service to society, this was unusual. Jesus’ life, though, was lived in togetherness. Close to God whom he called Abba (his Father), born of Mary, adopted by Joseph, shaped by home and synagogue, growing into adulthood in Nazareth, calling the ‘twelve’ (Luke 9.1), sending the ‘seventy’ (Luke 10.1), drawing them and others into a new community, Jesus’ life was lived with others. Jesus gave himself to others – teaching his disciples, bringing good news to the poor, healing the sick, delivering the oppressed, touching the outcast, befriending the stranger, welcoming the rejected, meeting opposition and eventually dying at their hands.

Jesus spent his life with and for others. It was through others that Jesus’ understanding of his truest identity and deepest vocation grew. It is in Jesus that our creation for relationship, fellowship and communion with others comes to fulfilment. It is through him that we are redeemed from our propensity, distorted as we are by sin, to turn in on ourselves and away from God, from each other, and from the creation in which we are placed. It is through him, and through the community of friends that he gathers, that we can be drawn deeper into mutuality and fruitfulness and so deeper into God’s life.

Today, some Christians, patterning themselves on Jesus’ life, devote themselves to the single life as a free expression of their loving response and faithful service to God. They find that their readiness to forsake sexual intimacy and the opportunity to have children is received by God in a particular kind of intimacy and relationship with Christ, the Church and the world.

Others, though, through a variety of circumstances, find themselves single through no choice of their own and without any sense of being called by God into such a life; and for them the relationships of the church generally fail to provide the sort of mutuality and way of fruitfulness they yearn for. Their loss is real and painful. They call the church to shape its life in ways that allow the intimate love of God to be experienced more fully in the relationships of our common life.

For more discussion about singleness see Chapter 5, here and here. For further discussion about celibacy and the consecrated life, see Chapter 12, here–here.

Some Christians find themselves drawn into relationships of deep love for another person of the same sex. They find that these relationships bring them life-giving gifts of knowing and being known by another person, but that they are not affirmed and celebrated by the church. Sometimes those relationships have been sealed through the commitment of vows recognized by state and society as marriage, but not embraced by the church’s teaching and practice of marriage described in the following chapter. Their loss is also real and painful. It is at least one of the reasons for what follows in Parts Two to Five of this book where we will explore further the will and way of God for all of our relationships.

Questions about same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage are discussed in a number of places in the book. See, for example, Chapter 5, here–here; Chapter 6, here–here and here–here; Chapter 7, here–here; Chapter 13, here-here; and the conversations in Part Five, Scene 1, here-here and Scene 2, here–here.