On antiquity, apathy and apostasy

“The city was built in a square, and its length was equal to its width...The wall was made of jasper, and the city was made of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundation stones of the city walls were decorated with every kind of jewel. The first foundation was jasper, the second was sapphire, the third was chalcedony, the fourth was emerald, the fifth was onyx, the sixth was carnelian, the seventh was chrysolite, the eighth was beryl, the ninth was topaz, the tenth was chrysoprase, the eleventh was jacinth, and the twelfth was amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate having been made from a single pearl. And the street of the city was made of pure gold as clear as glass. I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the city’s temple” (Revelation 21:16 -22, The New Jerusalem).

Angkor Wat, a Hindu-Buddhist temple complex in Cambodia is considered the largest religious structure in the world. Dedicated to the deity Vishnu, the supreme being of the universe, it is described as "one of these temples, a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michelangelo". Yet, what of it and that of Solomon? What is the relevance of reverence other than relic of the bygone times?

The western wall of the Second Temple's courtyard stands as the main remnant of its physical structure on a plateau of rock named Mount Moria on the eastern flank of Jerusalem, which had for centuries dominated the skyline of the city. The Second Temple was built in 515 BC after the destruction of King Solomon’s First Temple that stood there for 410 years. In 586 BC,  Nabuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon "set fire to the Temple of Yahweh, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem" (2 Kings 25:9). The confronting end of 2 Kings saw everything taken away from Jerusalem as the city was destroyed together with the temple in a colossal tragedy followed by another exile of the Israelites.

It is on the same Mount Moria many generations back that Abraham made a covenant with God. A man named Abram in Mesopotamia had come by a profound insight as it was taught by Jewish scholars - that there existed unique, intangible and omnipotent, a single deity that created this universe. Rather than stay in a city polluted by idolatry of other gods, Abram had chosen instead to leave his home, travelling with his family to the land that would one day be called Judaea. All this was part of the divine plan. God, appearing to Abram had told him that despite the great age of his childless wife, she would bear him a son and that his descendants would one day inherit a Promised Land. As a token of this, Abram was given a new name, Abraham, and commanded by God many divine instructions including sacrifice of the most precious treasure he had being the only son Isaac. As Abraham was willing to offer this, God confirmed the promise that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky as a covenant "and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me" (Genesis 22:18). Past and future, earth and heaven, mortal endeavours and divine presence - all had stood revealed as conjoined. Not long after, Jerusalem had come under Israelite control under a one-time shepherd boy and harpist by the name of David from a small town called Bethlehem. David had risen to become king over the whole of Israel and was shown the spot where the First Temple would be built by his son Solomon. Solomon - a king of wealth and wisdom that his name would ever after serve the Jews as a byword for splendour - made Mount Moria the mountain of the house of God. It was Solomon, after the completion of the temple, who had placed in the Holy of Holies the greatest treasure that the Israelites possessed: a gilded chest or the Ark, made to precise specifications laid down by God himself and in which his presence was manifest on earth. This then, was the glory of Israel: that its temple was truly the house of God. 

Such a glory was not merely given: it had to be earned in this world of the Old Testament. The charge laid upon his people by God, to worship him as was his due, came with warnings. "See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse - the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse, if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God" (Deuteronomy 11 :26-29). Over the centuries that followed Solomon's building of the First Temple, the people had repeatedly strayed, and after four hundred years of disobedience, they had reaped a bitter harvest. First, the Assyrians conquered the north of the Promised Land: ten of the twelve tribes who traced their lineage back to Israel had been taken into captivity, and vanished into the maw of Mesopotamia. Not even the fall of Assyria to Babylon in 612 BC had seen them return. Then, in 587 BC, it had been the turn of Judah, the kingdom that took its name from the fourth son of Israel and of its capital, Jerusalem. The king of Babylon had taken the city by storm. Nothing of the temple built by Solomon, nor its fittings of cypress wood nor its gilded gates nor its bronze pillars ornamented with pomegranates had been spared. Only ruins and weeds  remained. When in her turn Babylon had fallen and the Persians had wrested from her the mantle of empire, and Cyrus had given permission for the Second Temple to be rebuilt, the complex that arose on Mount Moria was merely a shadow of what had stood before. Starkest of all the reminders of vanished glories was the Holy of Holies. The Ark, upon which the glory of God Himself, in a cloud of impenetrable darkness had been accustomed to descend, was gone. No one could say for certain what its fate had been. Only the block of stone seen by Pompey the Great when he captured the temple and stepped into the chamber, bare and unadorned, served to mark the spot where it had once stood. 

Throughout its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, captured and recaptured 44 times and attacked 52 times. So it is not surprising that Pompey captured Jerusalem during the great siege of 63BC. What of the temple? Tom Holland described that in all the world, there stood only a single shrine regarded by the vast majority of his devotees as legitimate. Sacrifices were practised across the Mediterranean yet the mystery for which this temple was notorious lay deep within the complex: a chamber treasured by the Jews as the single holiest place in the world. With such reverence did they regard this room that no one was permitted to enter it except for their high priest and even then, only once a year. To the Jews, there was only the one God and that the temple stood as a replica of the universe that He alone had brought into being. In the robes worn by the high priest were to be seen mirrors held up to the cosmos, in the rituals he performed, an echo of the divine labour of creation at the beginning of time, on the golden plate he wore on his forehead, an awesome inscription that of the name of God himself, which sacred custom ordained should only ever be uttered by the high priest, and even then only once a year, when he went into the Holy of the Holies. 

To desecrate the temple was to desecrate the universe itself.

So imagine when the temple was destroyed for the third time by Pompey.  Pompey's men in capturing the temple had already stormed its outer courtyard. The priests, surprised as they were pouring libations and burning incense, had not so much as paused in their rites. Now, piled up in the outer courtyard where the gentiles were once allowed to worship but not enter further, priests lay slaughtered and it was their blood, borne on the water that gushed from the base of the altar that was being sluiced away. Pompey could not help but admire their fortitude in the face of death. Long after the rest of Jerusalem had surrendered, defenders there had persisted in defying the conqueror and now, the great rock on which it stood was piled with bodies and sticky with blood. Foreign invaders had desecrated Mount Moria again even as the high priest and his acolytes sought to cleanse it of the traces of the Roman siege, and to restore to the temple its accustomed rites. 

Why would God have permitted an alien conqueror to trespass within the Holy of the Holiest unless it were to express his anger with its guardians? Perhaps its guardians were beguiled through ritual sacrifices and burnt offerings sought to please God in a temple which was said to contain His presence but could barely contain a sweeping trace of his holiness. Isaiah in the time of King Uzziah's end around 750-742BC already saw the Lord as so "high and exalted" that only "the train of His robe filled the temple" (Isaiah 6:1). It's as if in Isaiah's vision that the roof is taken off the majestic First Temple and all we can see is the hem of God's garment as He seats on the heavenly throne. An edge of His train fills the temple with His glory. The point is if anyone thinks God can be contained by a temple, whatever temple men might make, He is impossibly greater than what we can imagine. Let alone one created, built and later corrupted by human hands that by the time of the Second Temple, it consisted from the outermost court of the gentiles, to court of the women, court of the Israelites, court of the Israelites reserved for  ritually pure Jewish men, court of the priests, the temple court with the Brazen Laver, Alter of Burnt Offerings and the inner Temple building itself with three district chambers: vestibule, sanctuary and the innermost chamber - Holy of Holiest. No wonder Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling as he overturned the tables of the money changers and sets of those trading animals for burnt offerings at the outer court of gentiles as he scorned  "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations but you have made it a den of robbers.” (Mark 11:17).

Just as centuries amid the calamities of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, prophets appeared to urge their countrymen to reform their ways or else risk obliteration so in the wake of Pompey's conquests, there were Jews who in a similar manner despaired of the temple establishment and what it had become. Many more Jews lived beyond the limits of the Promised Land than within them. Distance from the temple, its rituals and sacrifices and prayers would gradually have seen their sense of Jewish identity blur and fade but as it was, they did not need to travel to Jerusalem on one of the 3 pilgrim festivals held every year to feel themselves "in the presence of God". Rather, they had only to go to one of the numerous houses of prayer an instruction that were to be found wherever Jews were congregated: a house of assembly or synagogue. Here, boys would be taught to read, and adults schooled throughout their lives in the interpretation of some very specific texts. God's words transcribed onto parchment scrolls, were kept, when they were not being studied, in a box that deliberately echoed the long-vanished Ark: a marker of their holiness. Other people could claim possession of texts from gods but none were so charged with a sense of holiness, none so attentively heeded, none so central to the self understanding of an entire people as collection of writings cherished by Jews as their holiest scripture. Torah (תּוֹרָה), they called it 'teachings'. It is no surprise that theologian and author, Peterson Leithart, once stated (like many others along similar lines) that “The Bible is the speech of God. Every encounter with the Bible is an encounter with the living God, whose Spirit inspired the text and is active in its reception. This book is the bread without which you cannot live.”

Five scrolls portrayed the original working of God's purposes, from the creation of the world to the arrival on Cannan's borders, after many hardships and wanderings of Abraham's descendants, ready at last to claim their inheritance. The story did not end there. There are many other writings held sacred by the Jews. There were histories and chronicles, detailing everything from the conquest of Cannan to the destruction and rebuilding of the temple. There were records of prophecy, in which men who felt the word of God like burning fire within their bones gave it utterance. There were collections of proverbs, takes of inspirational men and women and an anthology of poems named psalms. All these various writings, by many different hands over the course of many years served to provide Jews beyond the Promised Land with much raved reassurance: that living in foreign cities did not make them any less Jewish. 

Nor centuries on from Alexander's conquest of the world, did the fact that the vast majority of them spoke not the language of their ancestors but Greek. A bare 70 years after Alexander's death, there had begun to emerge in Alexandria large numbers of Jews who struggled to understand the Hebrew in which most of their scriptures were written. The mission to translate them, so the story went, had come from none other than Demetrius of Phalerum. Keen to add to the stock of the city's great library, he had sent to Jerusalem for 72 scholars. Arriving in Alexandria, these had set diligently to work translating the holiest text of all, the five scrolls or Pentateuch, as they were called in Greek (it was possible that the categorisation of the various Jewish holy books - what Jews today call the Tanakh and Christians, the Old Testament - derived originally from the way they were catalogued in the ancient library of Alexandria). Other texts had soon followed. Not merely books, they were hailed by Greek speaking Jews as ta biblia ta hagia - the holy books - as this phrase appears in 1 Maccabees 12.9. Demetrius, so it was improbably claimed, had defined them as 'philosophical, flawless and divine'. So a body of writings originally collated and adapted by scholars who took for granted the centrality of Jerusalem to the worship of their God was slipping its editors' purposes: the biblia came to possess, for the Jews of Alexandria, a sanctity that rivalled that of the temple itself. Wherever there existed a scribe to scratch their verses onto parchment, or a student to commit them to memory, or a teacher to explicate their mysteries, their sanctity was affirmed. Their eternal and indestructible nature as well. It was not constructed out of bricks or mortars to be levelled by a conquering army. Wherever Jews might choose to live, there the body of their scriptures would be present as well  - a surer path to the divine than any idol could provide. The holiness of Jerusalem in Christianity, conserved in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible which Christians adopted as the Old Testament was reinforced by the New Testament in fulfilling the prophecies in ways unimaginable to the audience at the time. 

The richness of scripture resonates in this modern era when these foundational events, that straddled the dawn of the 1st millennium BC on and the sobriety of a holy city in the heart of Jews, are recorded and reverberated through history until the 21st century.  Just as the destruction of the temple by Pompey transpired about 40 years after Jesus' death as predicted, the true temple is rebuilt and resurrected as prophesied. The tabernacle was first built by Moses to symbolise the covenant presence of God amongst His people as a tent that would accompany Israelites through the wilderness and in which the glory of God would dwell among them wherever they go (Exodus 25), the true tabernacle stands against the test of time after the curtain of the physical Second Temple that separated the Holy of the Holiest was torn in two (Matthew 27:51). It is like an incarnate temple. For in Christ there is a new and lasting temple of the living God, with His people who are members of Christ, where permanent presence of God is forever amongst His covenant people as truly "a house of prayer for all the nations" (Isaiah 56:7). Like the temple, the church is never about its spire or space, structure or sacred decors to represent only a semblance of God's holiness but rather, it is where God's people dwell in Christ.

When the Jews sought to make sense of their temple’s fall, they did not look to philosophy. Instead, in pain and bewilderment, they turned to their God. It is perhaps precisely God who can turn what marks as the most despairing day in the Jewish Calendar, Tisha B'Av (תִּשְׁעָה בְּאָב), also into hope which in the Hebrew word of HaTikvah (תקותי) is interwoven with the meaning of expectation. So in the Hebrew context both biblically and linguistically, hope is powerfully more than just a dream but an expectation with a strong expression of faith. Unlike the English word that is often used to express speculative desires, the Hebrew hope invokes an association with God so that the term expresses confidence in a future outcome with a present divine strength. "For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." (Jeremiah  29:11).

So if someone were to ask what do I make of such antiquity in this age of apathy and apostasy, I'd say that every single scriptural text stands true in wonderous ways - unlike how I would have answered it once upon a time many years ago. This scriptural view is one I once believed to be bold and borderline preposterous that once upon that many years ago when a friend told me about "absolute truth". How a conclusion, so far and far-reaching from what I would once entertain as a belief beyond me, has formed the foundation beyond question of my life, worldview and guiding light now is perhaps, well, beyond anyone but God. Just as the New Testament profoundly fulfils the Old Testament with astounding and astonishing awe, God sent a friend from half way around the world into my life by the name of Isaiah to proclaim Yeshayahu (יְשַׁעְיָהוּ), salvation of God, to an ordinary girl like me. It brings home for me the relevance of everlasting certainty in an uncertain and fickle world that is wary and weary of certitude, conviction and conclusiveness. 

So antiquity in an age of apathy and apostasy? Far more than meets the eye.

In acknowledgement of sermons on Isaiah by Tim Escott and Michael Jensen as well as Tom Holland's Dominion for the content of this blog. 

Rain

"There is this extreme difficulty or rather, impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a first cause with an intelligent mind … and I deserve to be called a theist." - Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

Rain can bring a time of renewal and reflection.

Virginia Wolf once wrote: 

“A fine rain, a gentle shower, was peppering the pavements and making them greasy...where it fell on earth...it drew up the smell of earth. Here a drop poised on a grass-blade and there filled the cup of a wild flower, till the breeze stirred and the rain was spilt...

Down on the roofs it fell - here in Westminster, there in the Ladbroke Grove, on the wide sea a million points pricked the blue monster like an innumerable shower bath. Over the vast domes, the soaring spires of slumbering cities, over the leaded libraries, the museums, now shrouded in brown holland, the gentle rain slid down, till, reaching the mouths of those fantastic laughers the many clawed gargoyles, it splayed out in a thousand odd indentations...

the fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind...share my bounty."

Perhaps some of us see sweet sentimentality in rain. 

Perhaps others see it as no more than the scientific fact of rain.

Perhaps for some of us, rainy days conjure up melancholy thoughts and muddy memories as they stir up scars that can summon a storm of swirling senses of sorrow.

We all know that rain is formed by water droplets that have condensed from atmospheric vapour as they fall under perfect gravity to form an essential part of the life cycle of earth. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the universe would collapse and if gravity were slightly less powerful, the universe would fly apart. The precision of our universe is full of wonder because gravity is precisely as strong as it needs to be. "If the ratio of electromagnetic force to the strong force wasn't one percent, life wouldn't exist. What are the odds that would happen all by itself?" Funny that a TV show can be as insightful as this, if you know this reference.

Rewind to Roman era, a remarkable event rocked history precisely in a manner of wonder. Where descriptions in ancient literature around the cruelty of crucifixion are surprisingly sparse, four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross have survived from antiquity. Remarkably, all four accounts described a crucifixion that took place on a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem in Golgotha ("the place of a skull" as it was called in Greek). A Jewish victim by the name of Jesus, a wandering preacher from an obscure town named Nazareth had been convicted of a capital offence against Roman order and died, according to Issac Newton’s calculation, either on 7 April AD 30 or 3 April AD 33 at the age of about 33. Anno Domini is the Latin for “in the year of the Lord” after the time of “Before Christ”.

Interestingly, there is no reason to doubt the historicity behind the essentials of a consistent narrative accounted by the four men named Luke, Mark, John and Matthew where even the most sceptical historians have tended to accept them. As eloquently put by Tom Holland, descriptions of Jesus' sufferings were nothing exceptional where pain, humiliation and the protracted horror of the most wretched of deaths over the course of Roman history were the common lot of multitudes. 

Decidedly not the common lot of multitudes however, was the fate of Jesus after death. 

The report in all four of the earliest narratives of Jesus - narratives called euangelia "good news" in Greek and known as gospels now, shared stories of Jesus who appeared to his followers not as a ghost but resurrected into a new and glorious form over the next forty days from his initial death. 

The utter strangeness of it, for the vast majority of people in the Roman world and many empires since, did not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine at a time when tales of gods and demi-gods reign and run riot. 

What is startling is perhaps that a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as God, the way he did it, with his own people in utter disbelief until his end. To the Jews at the time and even now, it is no more shocking than a total reversal of their most devoutly held assumption that could possibly have been imagined and inverted.

Centuries after the death of Jesus, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, banned crucifixion in the 4th century AD at a time when the cross came to serve the Roman people as an emblem of triumph over sin and death. In the rise and fall of his Byzantine empire and over a thousand years of the Byzantium history, the one thing that remained is the assurance that the cross provided to embattled people, that victory would ultimately be theirs even as the western half of the empire began to slip away from the rule of the Caesars with the fall to barbarian invaders.  The Byzantine empire was born of an effete Greek culture, defiant in its Roman heritage and yet, defined by a fundamentally Christian identity rooted in the strong eastern Orthodox religion that prevailed through time immemorial.

Byzantium though was not the only Christian realm. 

In the Latin-speaking West, a millennium and more after the birth of Christ, a fresh revolution brewed for the destiny of Christendom. In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with its faith in Christianity. The momentous understanding of God in which the emphasis was laid not upon his triumph but upon his suffering humanity led to years of yearning as people fix their eyes fully upon the cross. 

The Jesus portrayed by medieval artists dying as a victim of the cross resonated with Christians in the medieval Europe who identified with the sufferings of their God as they looked upon the image of their Lord, nailed to the cross with blood and brutality, a thorn-crowned head of men and a messiah. This understanding of a God in human form turned past glory of deity and divinity upside down. Enshrined as it was in the very heart of medieval Christianity, is an understanding that could not help but lodge in its consciousness a visceral and momentous suspicion that God was closer to the weak than we thought.

In 1601, a painting was installed in a church that had originally been built to exorcise the ghost of emperor Nero that paid homage to the outcast origins of the city's Christian order. Caravaggio was commissioned to paint a crucifixion of the disciple Peter, of his execution and being put to death by Nero. To think that the spread of Christian faith arose out of 12 ordinary disciples who told the most unfathomable tale at a time of persecution is, well, wondrous to say the least.  It is at once the most enduring legacy of classical antiquity and the index of its utter transformation. 

Formed of a great confluence of traditions -  Persian and Jewish, Greek and Roman - Christianity has long survived the collapse of the empire from which it first emerged to become one of the most hegemonic cultural system in world history. 

Unlike Osiris, Zeus or Odin, the Christian God still goes strong. 

In the European lands that acknowledged the primacy of the pope, there was only the occasional community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Roman Church at the time. It is this church and its influence that brought Christianity to Latin America in the 16th century and beyond, where approximately 90% of Latin Americans today are Christian and 57% of the total population in 2020 is Catholic. Even when the Catholic Christendom began to fragment and new forms of Christianity began to emerge, the conviction of Christians that their faith was universal remained deep-rooted which inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers - whether in Korea or in Tierra del Fuego, in Alaska or in New Zealand - the cross came to serve as the most globally recognised symbol that there has ever seen. One only need to look at the art deco statute of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro built in 1931 to realise that time itself has been Christianised. 

How was it that such a “cult”, inspired by execution of an obscure criminal in a long vanished empire, came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?

Christianity may be considered as the most influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. In fact, to live in a Western country is to live in a society that is still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions that is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. 

Down in the land under, one need not look beyond legacies of our constitution, Westminster system and bill of rights debate to see the profound impact of Christianity and its influence over a culture that anchors how we think. Whether we like it or not, public holidays such as Christmas and Easter are part of our annual calendar and fabric of our lives. Like a flood-tide of Christ, how the belief that this Son of the one God of the Jews who died on the cross came to be so enduringly and widely held is a wonder. So much so that one cannot imagine what this world would be like without this once so scandalous an idea.

Now, a kaleidoscope is an optical instrument with reflecting mirrors tilted at an angle carefully constructed to show symmetrical pattern from its regularly repeated reflection. 

Some might see it as a genius of random chance so that whatever coloured pieces of objects in a kaleidoscope, the rotation of multiple mirrored surfaces will make them beautiful anytime and anywhere. 

Some might see it as the culmination of mankind's fascination with light and reflection since ancient times, now born out of a light polarisation experiment in 1814 by successive reflections between plates of glass and mirrors first carried out in the form of a circular arrangement of images around a candle with multiplication of the sectors formed by the extremities of the plates. 

Yet to many, it is precisely men who are made in the image of God that brought life to ideas so curiously beautiful as part of the created world of an everlasting YHWH.

Like many things, there are those who rejoice, those who are sceptical and those who are appalled at this. Yet worldwide, almost a third of the planet's population of about two billion people subscribe to it.

So perhaps rain is what it is, made up of water molecules from a compound with a chemical formulate of H2O. 

Perhaps it is simply as a matter of fact the main constituent of earth's hydrosphere and fluids of all known living organisms in which it acts as a solvent. 

Yet, it exists in a world where earth's environment is close to water's triple point for it to be in solid, liquid and gaseous state, covering about 60% of our body, 71% of our planet's surface and over 90% of our hydrosphere. It is ice, fog, dew, cloud, snow, steam, ocean and all things vital when God separated the waters from the waters in Genesis.

Perhaps the universe is precisely the way it is, because that is how it is. 

Perhaps the spread of Christianity is not so extraordinary out of the ordinary.

Or perhaps, ultimately, we have a God who has us exactly where He wants us to be. 

With acknowledgment of Tom Holland’s Dominion and his copyright throughout this piece. 

Christ in Christmas

The joy of God goes through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it, in fact precisely there; it does not deny grave sin but finds forgiveness precisely in this way; it looks death straight in the eye but finds life precisely within it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940–1945

Streets are deserted as the wind whispers its cold breath against closed doors, sending a silent echo in the soul of this city. Bethlehem is empty this Christmas. 

From life to death, beginning to new beginnings, Bethlehem to Calvary holds historical significance for Christians around the world. Historians have considered Jerusalem as a Pythian city which exhausts itself in preserving the most ancient past and auguring the most distant future, held under pressure in an almost infinite chronological arc from Genesis to Apocalypse.  I wonder if similar sentiment stands for Bethlehem. Its Church of Nativity is renowned for and revered by many as location of Christ's birth (despite scholarly debates and division over whether it is here or Nazareth or non-existent altogether). 

The former glory and glow of Christmas is no more this year. Manger Square is the heart of a ghost town in mourning. In a nearby church, Christ's cradle is nestled in debris of death and destruction. A nativity in rubble to represent Gaza genocide. Celebrations are cancelled in Bethlehem as the city grieves and sadness spreads across the Holy Land.  It is a striking scene in contrast to what is a season of special celebration and a time of festivity for many people these days. Yet, what is indeed Christmas?

In 1038, we find the first use of the word "Christmas". Short for "Christ's mass", it was recorded in Middle English as Crīstesmæsse and in Old English as Cristes-messe. Crīst is from the Greek word of Khrīstos (Χριστός), a translation of the Hebrew word Māšîaḥ (מָשִׁיחַ), meaning "anointed" and mæsse is from the Latin word missa, the celebration of the Eucharist. Unlike the name, history of Christmas does not begin with Christ. In fact, the actual date of Christ's birth is not on Christmas. The fact that Christmas falls around the same time as the winter solstice and the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia is no coincidence as many Christmas rituals evolved from pagan rites.

From the Roman celebration of god Mithras on 25 December came a festival that was adopted by the Christian Church to commemorate the Nativity. When was Christ even born? In the oldest surviving Christian chronology written in AD221, the historian Julius Africanus postulated that Jesus was conceived on 25 March which later became known as Lady Day. Yet, the prominence of Christmas increased over the time and by Tudor times, preparation for the Yuletide season began weeks in advance. The forty days before Christmas were called Advent, which was a season of expectation and atonement. Because of Advent, tradition demanded that houses were not decorated for the festive season until Christmas Eve.

As for Christmas decorations, evergreens had long been deemed miraculous for staying alive while other plants died so they were seen to symbolise eternal life. Carrying evergreens into the house was held to bring good fortune but not before Christmas Eve as it was a superstition since the ancient Druids. Holly, ivy and mistletoe had been used since pre-Christian times to celebrate the winter solstice. Although there was a medieval tradition that Christ's cross had been formed from the wood of the mystical mistletoe tree and the claim that holly symbolises Christ's crown of thorns, these decorations are part of distorted rites and rituals. As for the custom of decorating a Christmas tree, well, it did not become popular in England until the 19th century.

The list goes on. From the pagan tradition of yule log since Viking times to the Tudor feasting after Advent fasting, you have turkey's rise to popularity as a Christmas dish by the end of Elizabeth's reign, Christmas pudding's evolution from a kind of suet pudding in Tudor times and mince pies made with shredded leftover meats in commemoration of the shepherds (there were supposed to be 13 ingredients in honour of Christ and His Apostles!). Add Lindt chocolate from modern day commercialisation and prawns for an Aussie Christmas, just to name a few, it's become a concoction and cacophony of whatever we make of Christmas.

There is none of these in Bethlehem this Christmas. The sombre city marks Christmas with a powerful and poignant message - solidarity with Palestine - as the Holy Family Cave depicts a harrowing tableau of a bombed out version of the traditional nativity cave. Surrounded by rubble and barbed wire, the Virgin Mary embraces the baby Jesus, while Joseph embraces her, offering solace. On one side of the family, the Magi holds out a white shroud. On the other side, the fourth shepherd carries a bag as a symbol of Palestinian displacement. We cannot help but wonder what have we done?

Bethlehem is Bet Leḥem in Hebrew (בֵּית לֶחֶם) that means "house of bread". As the Gospel stated in the New Testament that "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God." (Matthew 4:4), are we lost in the materialistic manna of this broken world? Have we forgotten God's divine providence and provision to feed the Israelites and to give us the living water? Did we completely miss the meaning of an extraordinary thing that is the birth of a God that came into our world through Christ as an imprint of His character so that we can see what God is like?

We were made in the image of God in creation, tasked with representing God to the world and the world to God - of doing what God would have done and liked us to do. Yet, how miserably did we fail and fall when we were supposed to be what Christ is like but in the end, God had to send his only son who is more truly human than anyone before or since as he has fulfilled the calling we had in representing the heart of God to the world in human form. He is the firstborn over all creation and it is in Christ, we see Adam's original role over creation fulfilled and our sins atoned on the cross. If we want to see what God is like, we can look to Christ and if we want to understand what human beings ought to be like, we can see it from Christ as he fulfilled the original calling despite the fall of Adam and Eve that broke a created world into a broken world of today.

So have a turkey or don't have a turkey, celebrate or don't celebrate Christmas. 

But have God, the Son and the Holy Spirit firmly in your heart for Christ in Christmas is what it calls for.

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ChatGPT Version (by feeding the blog "On Pain and Suffering")

In homage to the divine occasion of Christmas, a celebration anchored in the Christian faith, where the joyous carols and festive lights echo the profound story of the birth of Jesus Christ—a narrative that transcends the glitter and glow.

In a world where the true essence of Christmas often contends with the commercial glitter, this festive season holds a sacred place. A realm where the sociocultural tapestry may sometimes overshadow the spiritual significance of Christ’s birth. Amidst the exchanging of gifts and the merry gatherings, the true Christian meaning beckons believers to reflect on the miraculous story that unfolded in Bethlehem.

Just as a great man faced suffering with silent dignity, Christmas brings forth the story of a humble virgin, Mary, who brought forth the Son of God. The narrative is not merely about a manger but the divine purpose it signifies—the incarnation of God to reconcile humanity with Himself. It’s an invitation to ponder the profound message of love, redemption, and hope that emanates from the nativity narrative.

Much like the Hindu view of karma, Christmas calls for acceptance and detachment—acknowledging the divine plan unfolding through the birth of Jesus. The celebration aligns with the Christian understanding that suffering is not eradicated but redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice. It echoes the sentiment that in Christ’s birth, God intervened to share in the human experience and to provide a path to salvation.

For Christians, Christmas is not just a commemoration but an acknowledgment that God cares about the human experience. The narrative unfolds in a world where, like the Garden of Eden, suffering is woven into the fabric of human existence. Yet, in the Christmas story, believers find solace, seeing in the birth of Christ evidence that God embraces humanity’s joys and sorrows.

This piece is not a scholarly exposition but a fictional exploration, a reflection on the enduring spirit of Christmas that transcends the tinsel and lights, revealing the transformative power of the divine love manifested in the birth of Jesus Christ.

God the Genie?

Extol the Lord, O Jerusaleum;
praise your God, O Zion,
for he strengthens the bars of your gates
and blesses your people within you.
He grants peace to your borders 
and satisfies you with the finest of wheat.
Psalm 147:12-14.
 

I have been praying since 603 days ago when Russia annexed parts of Ukraine. Praying for an end to the latest episode of wars in this world, yet it has not stopped. Nor have my prayers.

It is an eve of silent prayers as I turn to God when Gaza has the world on edge. We fear for conflict in the Middle-East that may spiral into unceasing suffering which in turn fuels our own worry of war in another continent.

People ponder why we pray if what we pray for won't come true. God is not a genie. He is not conveniently compact in a bottle. Nor should we wager with God. I mean, have we reduced God and our faith to a point where our belief is based, conditionally, upon His answer to our prayers? How many times had Jesus performed miracles and how many more miracles will we demand from God?

Prayers are often considered as talking to God the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, as we wait for His glory. It should not surprise us that prayer to the biblical God is speech as he is a personal and relational God. Speech is how we relate to one another. God for his part has spoken to us at many times and in various ways. Through his Word preserved in the scripture over centuries of oral traditions and translation of historical texts, through the prophets and messianic psalms of poetry and by his Son who came into this world to suffer what we suffered since Adam's fall broke His creation. A world created by words of God in the beginning.

Religion is not a lifestyle choice and Christianity bears the cross of following Christ in ways harder than many. Someone dear told me that the children of God do not and will not lose faith when they have been subjected to sufferings and antisematic atrocities throughout centuries. It's not how religion works. So in the war of terror waged against Israel by Hamas, we are reminded of David's public prayers even when we fall. Praise be to you, O Lord, God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. (1 Chronicles 29:10).

So let us pray (in acknowledgement of authorship by St Andrew's Cathedral):

God of the nations,  
whose kingdom rules over all,  
have mercy on our broken and divided world. 
In the land promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, 
Bring peace in our time, O Lord. 
In the land of our Saviour’s birth,
banish the spirit that makes for war.
Please give wisdom to those you have placed in authority.
Rescue the captives, shield those in danger, and bind up the broken hearted. 
For those fighting for justice, may they be strengthened by your grace. 
For those walking in darkness, may the light of your face shine upon them.  
Above all, we pray that the peoples of Israel and the Middle East will find everlasting hope in you. 
And in the land of your Son’s redeeming death and resurrection, 
turn hearts to look to the Saviour and live. 
Bring peace, Lord, while we wait for Christ's coming and rule, 
When all people will beat their swords into ploughshares, 
When nation will not take up sword against nation, 
And when every tear will be wiped away 
by the Prince of Peace and Lord of Lords, 
Amen. 
 

On pain, peace and promise

One of the most agonising problems within our human experience is that few, if any, of us live to see our fondest hopes fulfilled. The hopes of our childhood and the promises of our mature years are unfinished symphonies. In a famous painting, George Frederic Watts portrays Hope as a tranquil figure who, seated atop our planet, her head sadly bowed, plucks a single unbroken harpstring. Is there any one of us who has not faced the agony of blasted hopes and shattered dreams? - Shattered Dreams by Martin Luther King 

We are fickle in this fleeting world of change. 

At times in our lives, the tail winds of joy, triumph, and fulfillment favour us, and at times the head winds of disappointment, sorrow, and tragedy beat against us. 

I often wonder without an unfailing faith, that is an inner spiritual engine which sustains many Christians in spite of the winds, how can one navigate the mishaps and misfortunes of this world? 

The expression that people make ‘peace’ with their circumstances - be it adversity or calamity - is somewhat misleading. Does it mean to live with frustration tinted with bitter resentment? A fatalistic acceptance of the will and whims of this imperfect universe? A libertarian and materialistic mind to do what one pleases in pursuit of happiness that provides temporary relief in taking one's mind off root causes but could never meet our insatiable wishes?

Martin Luther once said that ‘peace’ as the world commonly understands it, comes when the summer sky is clear and the sun shines in scintillating beauty, when the pocketbook is full, when the mind and body are free of ache and pain. But this is not true peace. 

The peace of which Apostle Paul instilled and spoke of is a calmness of soul amid terrors of trouble, inner tranquility amid the howl and rage of outer storm, the serene quiet at the center of a hurricane amid the howling winds. We readily understand the meaning of peace when everything is going right and when one is “up and in,” but we are baffled when Paul spoke of that true peace which comes when a man is “down and out,” when burdens lie heavy upon his shoulders, when pain throbs in his body, when he is confined by the stone walls of a prison cell, and when disappointment is daily reality. True peace is calm amidst storm and tranquility amidst disaster. 

When Jesus said to his disciplines that "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you" (John 14:27), peace or shalom, is not simply the state of not being at war with oneself. Rather, it is the state of being right with God, the creator, and His world, the creation. Shalom is what God's kingdom will be like. For Jesus to give it to his disciples is for them to have the deepest security as they dwell in the protection of God, even in the midst of trouble. Thus, Jesus said "do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid." As a ruler who ruled by dying on the cross to set us free from sin, the extraordinary blessing by him is a promise of peace that we can know in our life despite all its troubles - ironically, without brute force, mighty strength or skilled swordsmanship that conquers all.

People often look at our Christian conviction and consider it a human folly.  Yet, genuine faith imbues us with the conviction that beyond time is a divine Spirit and beyond life is Life External. However dismal may be the present circumstances, we know we are not alone, for God dwells with us in life’s most confining cells and defining moments as well as prepares us for beyond this life as Christ has conquered death. 

So God's creative power is never constrained by this earthly life, nor is His majestic love locked within the limited walls of time and space as we know it. Our earthly life is a prelude to a new awakening, and death is an open door that leads us into life eternal. So the Christian faith makes it possible for us to accept that which cannot be changed, to meet disappointments and sorrow with an inner poise, and to absorb the pain of this world without abandoning our sense of hope.

For “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28). 

Whatever it may be.

Themed with a song: https://youtu.be/qv-SXz_exKE?si=RO8ft2XHQ9L2f790

On love and longing

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. 1 Corinthian 13:1-8

For the last three years around Easter, I have blogged about the profound passion of Christ. Drawn to the cataclysmic complexity of a compelling message behind the Son of Man's mission that weaves to complete God's tapestry of grace with such grief and gravity, it is a time of the year that calls for contemplation to consider our own existence in the speck of human history and divine intervention.

Yet, I have not ruminated on the message of love that Easter resonates, as reflected in the new command that Christ left us. Just before passover, "Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave his world...Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (John 13:1). He poignantly reminded his disciples of what it means to love, during his final hours leading up to the pivotal point of his mission that would be marked by pain and suffering coupled with humiliation and utter abandonement on earth as it was in heaven during his dying moment alone on the cross. In John's gospel, Jesus said to his disciples "my children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come" yet, "a new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples" (John 13:34). 

We may often forget that in the tragedy and cruelty of the crucification, it is the humility and humanity of Christ that we saw on the cross. When his own people tore him apart both bodily and in spirit, and some casted lots to divide his clothing, Jesus still spoke from the cross with compassion to plead that "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). As Michael Jensen has put it, ultimately, "motivated by love, Jesus accepts the mission of attoning for our sins, accepting in his own body the consequences of sin and evil, the whole volumne of our rage against God for daring to be God". His humble bearing of our sins on the cross is also the humility of God that we see. So as Jesus asked his disciples to take up the cross and follow him, Jesus calls us to follow behind him in a life of sacrificial love for the sake of others. 

To be his disciple, one cannot avoid the cross or fail to accept what Jesus offered us there. Rather, we are called to seek in our heart the strength and steadfast faith to live a life that stands as a visible imprint of his sacrifice. So in following after Jesus, we do so by forgetting oursleves as the centrepiece in our own lives as well as perhaps even those of others in our lives and by truly giving oneself to deeds of sacrifical love.  What sounds harsh to our modern day ears and seems heretic to the utilitarian rationality of our thinking in this day and age, is actually a divine way to live. It is a hard way to live. Yet, the contradictions of the cross which, like many parables of Jesus' ministry, through paradoxes show "what looks like weakness turns out to be the power of God. What looks like foolishness turns out to be wisdom. What looks like loss is actually gain."

Just as the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone through the cross and resurrection of Christ (Psalm 118:22), the cornerstone of the Christian message is also one of love as is the meaning of Easter. God has loved and longed for us since time immemorial when after genesis of the once perfect world, He created man in His image and woman for man as it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). Then, throughout the old testament and despite death, sickness and suffering in a world that is not meant to be as it once was, the Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God (Psalm 14:2). "...the Lord longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you, for the Lord is a God of justice and blessed are all those who wait for him" (Isaiah 30:18). 

So as Christ has risen and is resurrected, God has reached out to us through His only son and revealed the abounding love, grace and mercy that He has for us. 

And this is the love we ought to long for and try to live out in our humble lives.

With tribute to Good Friday Service at St Mark's DP, 27:22 - 41:45 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cfEH-mai4E&t=1395s and Christ, the Conspiracy Theory at St Mark's DP, 22:47 - 39:05 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q82lzwAmPtM&t=2353s

Chaos, Calamity and the Cycle of Human History?

"Human history is one prolonged and painful limping. We invariably step with one foot on the rock of justice, and with the other, we sink into the mire of deceit and self-delusion."   - Daniel Hristov, the End of the Jesus Era (Part One)

About two years ago, I wrote about humanity at its worst and some rare moments of its best in a pandemic crisis that struck us in the wake of our COVID-19 outbreak.

Two years on, some people think that we can't be any worse with war in Ukraine, flood in Australia and a resurgent pandemic that sends large cities like Shanghai into a total lockdown, all of which compound the economic shock waves that will be felt by generations. Yet, it is far worse if we look beyond the recent reality seared into the forefront of our human psyche by mainstream media.

A sweeping scan of the situation elsewhere in 2022 alone shows the world is grim in:

• Sudan, where political tension and unrest drove people away from homes amidst regional drought. If you think an inflation rate of 8.5% in the US is bad, it is skyrocketing here with 388%.
• Syria, where economic crisis compounded a decade of war. If you think the cost of living is steep in developed countries like Australia, COVID-19 and economic coallpse have increased the average price of essential food items by 236% here.
• Myanmar, where violent deadlock left millions in need as they flee conflict ever since the memorable events of February 2021. A cycle of armed clashes and violence caused significant displacement of over 440,000 people since February in addition to an existing 370,000 who fled homes perviously.
• South Sudan, where regional conflict combined with climate crisis. If you think the recent flooding in Australia's east coast led to record high insurance claims, forget about insurance here. In a country infested with conflict, disease, starvation and natural disaster shocks, including floods, over 7.2 million people faced IPC3 level crisis and 100,000 faced IPC5 level catastrophe levels which toppled the existing issues of food security (that's over 60% of the population).

The list goes on and that's in the span of a millisecond in millenniums of human history over millions of years.

A cynic might say all this is part of the chaos, calamity and the cycle of human history. A cynical Christian might say that the world was broken as early as in Genesis after Eden's fall. God's wrath was splashed across multiple books of the Old Testament with repeating disappointment in His chosen people. In the words of Moses in 8th century BC recorded in Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Torah, plagues, disasters, wasting hunger, burning consumption and bitter pestilence ravaged the earth with death and sickness. At around 30 AD, Jesus sat on the Mount of Olives and said to his disciples that "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows... you will be hated by all nations because of me...but he who stands in the end will be saved" (Matthew 24:7-13).

A songwriter Brian Morykon once said that "When bad things happen, personally or globally, our ideas about God can be placed into a crucible and put into a furnace. The greater the pain and the more inexplicable the injustice, the hotter the heat... Some ideas get burnt up, some come out more true, few emerge unchanged." But not all are put through trials and tribulation like Job and come out with blessings to treasure from the experience we look back upon with growth. Our world is in constant turns and turmoils in between moments of fleeting goodness. So Brian went on to question when the world is burning, what should we ask for, and does it make any difference. Does the mailbox of heaven have to reach a certain capacity for the ruler of our universe to extend a hand of mercy to those who sufffer?

We often see in people that the sufferings in this world can bring up existential questions of why it is so. Many Christians may turn to prayers to find ways on how we can enter into such suffering that is perhaps redemptive and healing. Whilst all of us are different and each method may have its own merits, I wonder if we may forget what is at the heart of Christianity in times of suffering from time to time? Pain is everywhere but what do we make of it?

Fitting for a day like this on Good Friday (or perhaps more fitting with the name Holy, Great, Long or Black Friday) is our reflection about the Cross and what it embodies at Calvary. Inspired by a great writer and preacher at a special Sydney Anglican church, I think all should think twice about this renowned symbol of Christianity just as he who wrestled with this for the semon today. Even the best of us can't and shouldn't detach ourselves from what was a deeply disgraceful and distatefully ugly scene at the Cross.  All the more ugly that suffering in this world came from what's within us.

As Michael Jensen has eloquently put it, we see in the Christ's crucifixion a deconstruction of humanity, pulling apart not just a body but the quality of being human with an attempt to rob away any and all dignity and honour in so doing. Suffering is far more than the experience of physical pain as the executionists of Christ stripped him of his humanity and slowly tortured him to death at the Cross. As I've written two Easters ago, those who were crucified historically often die by asphyxiation whilst trying to pull onself up in order to breathe against the gravity of one's own bleeding body through punctured wrists and ankles nailed against the cross. It's the worst form of dying. In Christ's case, his crucifixion was crowned with mockery and degradation - "He claims to be a somebody so let's remind him he's a nobody" as Michael has bluntly pointed out. The ugliness and shame of the Cross cannot be downplayed because what happened at the Cross looked a lot like "a deconstruction of a human being by other human beings".  Another of the many examples of "men's inhumanity to a man". Acknowledging these atrocities allows us to address these realities of the human condition.

The Cross was a brutal place and was intended to be so. Yet, how strange is it that this became a symbol of God's love for us. "The crown of thorns made as a bitter and nasty sign of what Jesus wasn't turns out to be the brilliant pointer to who Jesus actually is. The king who rules by dying for the sake of his people... For it was this moment of extreme Godlessness in human history, the most awful desecration, the least holy thing you could image that was also the moment of God's most intense presence to human beings". 

As it was powerfully put by Michael, in this act of utter hatred, God dislays the depth of his love. Though we intended this day for evil, God intended it for good... The worst we can do does not outfrank the good of our holy God - just as we said no to God, God said yes to us. 

So the Cross is a terribly ugly symbol of how hellish we are and can be, as well as how deeply we (can) shame and disgrace one another. Yet through God, who himself was in Christ, our shame and disgrace were borne and atoned by the man who died for us - bearing our shame and disgrace but atoning for our sins. So the Cross extroardinarily became something beautiful when God's divine purpose and miracle transformed it to become a sign not of shame but honour, not of ignominy but of glory, not of hate but of love. And it is here that we found in the Cross God's humble love for us to send the only son into the broken world of humanity. Not that we loved God but that He loved us.

Just as this broken world is littered with dead bodies past, present and future across the vast expanse of time through war, disasters, genocide, and human atrocities and a myriad of other causes, in sickness and in death will the earth endure as God relented from destruction in Genesis but saved us in Christ instead. We see this now and we see this at the time of Roman cross that stood for everything unjust in the world - be it hatred, violence, oppression, murder and genocide - as an instrument of total torture.

Perhaps the prospect of a new heaven and a new earth may fuel the faith of some who look forward to the passing of the first heaven and the first earth - a vision of John's that may appeal to some with its Holy City, the new Jerusalem that will shine with the glory of God with its brilliance like that of a precious jewel like a jasper, clear as crystal with twelve gates upon which will be written the names of the twelve tribes and without a temple as God will reside in it (Revelation 21:10-23). Yet, I wonder in the spirit of God's love as response to human horror that showed what men are and can be, whether that love alone which He has for us would simply suffice?

Ironically, Voltaire once wrote that "this system of All is good represents the author of nature only as a powerful and maleficent king, who does not care, as long as he carries out his plan, that it costs four or five hundred thousand men their lives and that the others drag out their days in want and in tears. So far from the notion of the best possible world being consoling, it drives to despair the philosophers who embrace it. The problem of good and evil remains an inexplicable chaos for those who seek in good faith." Yet it is in the ebbs and flows of the chaos, calamity and the cycle of human history that we see men's magnitude of sinfulness and God's love at the Cross.  

For nothing speaks more of God's way in love when Christ died and atoned for our sins at the Cross.

Attributing this article to an inspirational sermon at St Mark's Darling Point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og-cTOgtdes&t=2s