144 – That’s the Spirit!

Editorial: That’s the Spirit!

Near the beginning of Luke’s Gospel (4:16-21), after being led by the Spirit for forty days into the wilderness, Jesus returns ‘in the power of the Spirit’ to his home town of Nazareth, stands up in the synagogue on the Sabbath day and quotes the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
as he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free…

Filled with the Spirit, he proclaims his mission to announce an imminent reign of God or kindness descending upon Earth. He rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant and sits down. Then he says: ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ Of course, the people of Nazareth, who have seen him growing up as the son of Joseph the local carpenter, are appalled at his pretensions and try to throw him over a cliff. But he escapes.

When Jesus has gone away, that same spirit descends at Pentecost like tongues of fire upon the small community of his followers gathered in the upper room. It is a creative spirit and now the body of Christ on Earth becomes a social body, a body of people, allegro con spirito. The crowd outside think they are drunk. But Peter answers them: ‘Don’t be silly. It’s only nine o’clock in the morning!’ Then Peter, the fisherman, filled with the spirit, makes a terrific speech. Paul will develop that idea of a community with one spirit as ‘the body of Christ’. In the New Testament the spirit is embodied, as energy, as life, both in individuals, who may receive special ‘gifts of the spirit’ and embodied in the community, as the spirit of fellowship κοινωνια, communion.

I believe that God was created by the human imagination and the natural outcome of Christianity is humanism. The key to that outcome is descent – coming down to Earth – embodiment. Jesus, filled with the Spirit, begins his mission by proclaiming the coming of a fair and kind society on Earth, which he calls ‘the Reign of God’. Paul speaks of the Christian community as a sharing in the body of Christ: ‘We who are many are one body because we all share the same bread.’ (1 Cor 10:16-17). ‘In Christ,’ he tells the Galatians, ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek – you could say no black or white – there is no longer slave or free, no longer male and female’ – so non-racist, non-classist, non-sexist – ‘for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Gal. 3:28).

The ‘body of Christ’, sharing the same spirit, also becomes a model of a good society, in which everyone is of equal moral worth. At the time that was a revolutionary idea. These twin images of a ‘reign of kindness’ on Earth and the social ‘body of Christ’ are what made Christianity the mother of humanism. The early Christians expected Jesus to return and bring in this reign of God, which is good news for the poor and excluded. I think Jesus expected that too but it didn’t happen. Nevertheless, a fair and kind society remains a good idea, and as God doesn’t, hasn’t, come to make it happen, it is up to us. That’s the Spirit!

Dinah Livingstone

Letters to the Editor

Not Jesusian but Christian

I enjoyed Mark Dyer’s stimulating article in Sofia 143. Two things worry me. While it’s interesting to know what a particular Jew who lived 2000 years ago might have taught, that gives us no reason to follow him. We don’t follow anyone’s teaching unless we think it has something going for it. Does it matter who told the story of the Good Samaritan and whether the details are correct? And as far as I can tell, Jesus didn’t teach that much. Rather he stimulated thought and action through parables.

Secondly, church members don’t call themselves Jesusians but Christians. That’s because we don’t start with an assessment of a man who lived 2000 years ago. We start with the church, its worship, its communal attempt to be ‘the body of Christ’. We start with the ‘spirit of God’, the fountain of life, in which we are baptised and in which we live and move and have our being.

Now I’ll be the first to admit the dreadful and wicked short-comings of the church, past and present. But I don’t think its future lies in resurrecting teachings of a 2000 year old man, but in breathing new life into such images as the body of Christ and spirit of God. At its best, that’s what SOF does. And in that, I think lies its future.

Stephen Mitchell, Great Waldingfield

News from Don Cupitt

May I again beg a little space in your columns? On May 22 I pass my 88th birthday, and I have aged badly. I’m frail, but still thinking.

As I now see it, we live towards the end of one of the greatest cultural transformations in human history – the gradual changeover from a civilisation based on religion to one based on science and critical thinking. The TV documentary series was a series of studies of facets of the changeover. The new kind of society is so powerful that today we look our own self-destruction in the face. Our thinking turns towards a new idea: the primacy of ethics, especially in our understanding of Christianity.

Enough: I’m very old now!
Love,
Don

Thank you, Life!

Your Editorial caused me to well up with emotion; because I am so very grateful to have had the gift of life, to spend more time with the friends, and man, I love.

Mercedes Sosa is one of my favourite singers: have you heard her version of the Misa Criolla, by Ramirez? I also enjoy the singing of Maria Farantouri, from Greece. She also sings Gracias a la Vida. What caused my tears was your translation of Gracias a la Vida, with its mature recognition that human life contains suffering and pleasure. Grief is the price we pay for love. Your Editorial was wonderful: full of hope and awe at creation, and our ability to experience it.

Thank you, Dinah.
Mark Dyer, Wiveliscombe, Somerset

Human Nature

In a letter prompted by my article ‘Now that it has Happened’ in Sofia 142, Michael Hell (Sofia 143) implies that one should not judge oneself too harshly against impossible standards but, when I think about it, that judgement itself illustrates the point I was trying to make. Unfortunately, human beings, neither selfish nor unselfish (ref. David Rhodes’s musings on human nature in Sofia 143) but a muddle of the two, are concerned with their daily lives in familiar circumstances and the long known and widely recognised catastrophe facing us may be discussed academically but action is always postponed.

Of course, our institutions are unfitted for cooperation. Some people, by the way, have congratulated me on my piece, but they say it is nicely expressed or an intriguing story. Meanwhile, we carry on like the introduced species in Australia, out of harmony, with no restraint.

Digby Hartridge, Yate, Bristol