12
Christ in Three Sightings
A Poem with Commentary
Perfect and patient Master of the way,
teach me again the lessons of my past:
that in my weakness I will find your power,
that losing is the only way to find,
that every seed must fall before it flower.
Faithful and fond Companion on the way,
carry the burdens that I cannot bear.
The path is steep, steeper than I could guess
when you invited me to walk with you.
But this is not a choice I can escape.
I scramble upward under your duress.
Dauntless and mighty Master of the deep,
alone you quell its enmity.
I foundered and I fell far down.
I clasped and clung to you. Your arm
was strong to save. You set me on
a shore already known to me,
the contours of your love I see.
The first two stanzas of this poem were written at the most difficult time in the story I have told: around the time of my second eye injection. The third stanza was written later, in Sandwich, Kent, during the short holiday I took in Canterbury near the end of May.
In the first stanza the “lessons of my past” are those I have learned in both knowledge and experience. They are characterized by the three scriptural allusions in lines 3–5. First, there is the theme of God’s power in human weakness, which is one of the dominant themes of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. This has long been my favorite Pauline letter, and I wrote about this theme in 2 Corinthians in an essay (based on a sermon) published forty years ago.1 Since then this theme has again and again been a feature of my life with God in both major and minor experiences, including now the crisis about my eyesight.
Fundamental to the way Paul understands his experience in 2 Corinthians is that he shares in the ordinary frailty and vulnerability, both physical and psychological, that belongs to the human condition in this world. Neither his status as a Christian nor his calling as an apostle means that God turns him into some kind of superman. The power of God is at work in his life and ministry, but characteristically in the context of his weak and vulnerable humanity (see 2 Cor. 4:7; 12:8–10). In pursuit of his apostolic calling, Paul was constantly pushing himself to the limits of his own resources. He experienced all sorts of troubles, including at least one experience of only narrowly escaping death. In these circumstances Paul learned to trust in God, not in his own abilities. The power of God at work in his life and circumstances is evident in the way he reaches the limits of his endurance, but these experiences of suffering do not overwhelm or overcome him:
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven to despair;
persecuted, but not forsaken;
struck down, but not destroyed. (2 Cor. 4:8–9 [NRSV modified])
The Corinthians were inclined to think that Paul’s weakness threw doubt on his claim to be an apostle. But for Paul, his very evident human weakness made it clear that the power of the gospel at work through his ministry was the power of God, not his own achievement (4:7).
In these experiences Paul’s life was conformed to his gospel of the crucified and risen Jesus. For Jesus himself shared in all the frailty and vulnerability of human life to the extent of suffering a humiliating and excruciatingly painful death. The power of God did not exempt him from suffering but took effect through the weakness of the cross when God raised him from death (see 1 Cor. 1:25). So for Paul, it was the dying of Jesus that he experienced in his own frailty and sufferings (2 Cor. 1:5; 4:10–11), and it was the power of Jesus’s resurrection that he experienced in every escape from death, every encouragement received after anxiety and depression, every convert made in the midst of persecution, every consolation given in seeming failure (1:3–7; 4:7–12; 7:5–7).
As humans, and even as Christians, we are prone to rely on our own abilities as though they were absolutely our own rather than given and sustained by God. We may need those common experiences in which we reach the limits of our abilities and find that we cannot cope in order to realize that our abilities are limited. Such experiences bring home to us the need to trust in God. It is God who enables us to keep going when life gets really hard. It is God who enables us to complete the task that seems too much for us. It is God who rescues us from despair. It is God who consoles us when we feel forsaken. It is God who steps in to save us from the temptations that are too much for us to resist. It is God who gives us the help of family, friends, medical professionals, counselors, and others when we cannot help ourselves.
Of course, God is also at work in our strengths and our successes, but it is easy to ignore that. When we know that we are weak, we know that we must rely on God. I have found again and again that at the limits of my coping there is God. This is especially true, as it was for Paul, in the service of God. Anyone who knows only their strength and not their weakness cannot have given themselves to a task that demands all they can give. But discovering the power of God in our weakness is an invaluable experience. We learn to find in our weakness the compassionate solidarity of the crucified Christ. In that form of divine love we also have the assurance that, by God’s grace, we will pull through. We may not recover our health or achieve what had proved too much for us, but we will not be overwhelmed or overcome by these experiences. In some way we will experience already in our weakness the power of God that raised Jesus, sustaining our faith and our love. The power that will raise us, with Jesus, from death already makes a difference in the weakness of our mortal lives.
The second scriptural allusion (“losing is the only way to find”) points to a saying of Jesus that occurs, remarkably, six times in the four Gospels:2
Whoever seeks to gain their life will lose it,
but whoever loses their life will keep it. (Luke 17:33, my translation)3
This is the basic version of the saying. In its other occurrences, phrases are added that make clear its meaning. In most cases, “whoever loses their life” is expanded with “for my sake” or “for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel” (Matt. 10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24), making clear that the kind of losing life that is envisaged is not mere recklessness, but self-sacrifice out of devotion to the cause of Christ. In John 12:25, there are major variations, but the substance and structure of the aphorism are the same.
The saying is one of those compact aphorisms of Jesus that work by challenging us to understand the paradox they present. The different contexts in which this saying occurs in the Gospels show that it was seen to be relevant to Christian life in more ways than one. In several cases martyrdom, the ultimate way of giving one’s life for Christ, following his own example, is clearly in view. But in other cases, especially Luke 9:24 (following the use of “daily” in 9:23), a broader application to the renunciation of self throughout a life of discipleship is envisaged. This is easier to understand if we realize that the term psychē, translated “life,” strongly approaches the meaning “self.” The paradox of the saying challenges us to consider what is true life or the real self. Is it the selfish, self-aggrandizing self that clings to its life or the selfless, self-giving self that gives itself away?
The attempt to secure one’s life by living it for one’s own benefit is bound to fail because death comes to everyone and is the end of what the selfish person is trying to keep. To live one’s life as though one owns it and can use it and keep it for oneself is an illusion that death will always destroy. But there is also a sense in which living for oneself destroys life already before death. In grasping and hoarding their life for their own pleasure, the selfish person finds that the real fulfillment they seek escapes them even before life itself escapes them in death. The true self cannot be found that way.
The person, on the other hand, who renounces the path of self-gratification and expends their life in self-giving for God and for others finds their life given back to them by God. They keep their life by losing it. One could say that they lose the false self and find the true self, the self they are given by God and receive from God in place of the illusory self that attempts to live independently of God. In every act of self-giving, a blow is dealt to the old, self-aggrandizing self, and the new self gains ground. If this is true, then the supreme act of self-giving, martyrdom, must be the most complete instance of the saying’s truth. The one who gives their life in death will receive it again in eternal life. The old self is definitively renounced and the new self given.
In John 12:25 the saying is found in a unique context, in which Jesus applies it to himself, with reference to his death and resurrection. Here it follows a saying unique to John’s Gospel: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (12:24). This saying accounts for the third allusion in the first stanza of my poem: “every seed must fall before it flower.” Although Jesus says this with reference to his own death and resurrection, it is also clear from the context (see 12:26) that his way of the cross is the pattern for his disciples to follow, not only by martyrdom if required but also before death in their lives of discipleship. Jesus’s death is not only something he does for us but also something reflected in the shape of Christian living. The old self must continually die, “crucified” with Christ, as Paul puts it (Rom. 6:6; Gal. 2:20), so that the new self may share in the life of his resurrection.
When I wrote the lines “that losing is the only way to find, / that every seed must fall before it flower,” I had in mind, of course, the deterioration in my eyesight. I was reckoning with the possibility of losing my ability to read or, at best, of being able to read only with considerable effort. This was not a matter of voluntary renunciation or sacrifice. I had no choice in the deterioration of my eyesight. But I did accept that loss as God’s will for me. In what sense I would “find” or “flower,” I don’t think I had any idea. I merely had the conviction that, according to those sayings of Jesus, some kind of new flowering of my life with God must be God’s intention for me. It need not look like flowering from any other perspective, but from the perspective of knowing God and following Jesus, it would be so.
These were “lessons of my past” that in writing this stanza of the poem I was asking Jesus the Teacher to teach me again. (By “Master of the way,” I meant the one who had himself mastered the true way to life and taught it to others.) I had certainly reflected quite deeply on those sayings of Jesus, especially the paradoxical aphorism about losing life and finding it.4 But I meant also that I had learned them in experience. In all human lives, loss happens in many guises. For me the big losses, the ones that were hard to cope with, were not, I have to admit, heroic acts of self-sacrifice. They happened to me. In such experiences it is not easy to discern and accept God’s will in them. But in the long run I learned to do so and that life with God is as full of “finds” as it is of losses. It is a matter of recognizing the pattern of Jesus’s cross and resurrection working through one’s life.
Sometimes we can lose something very precious to us and actually have that very thing restored to us. I recall an example that a colleague of mine in the theology faculty at the University of Manchester related to me long ago. Barnabas Lindars, in addition to being a professor in the faculty, was also an Anglican Franciscan. He told me how, when he realized he had a vocation to join the Franciscans, he had to renounce his plans for an academic career, for which he was very well qualified. Only some time later the Franciscans decided it would be good to have someone within the order in academic theology and asked Barnabas to pursue his academic research and to apply for a post at the University of Cambridge. What he had given up was given back to him, now as an integral part of his vocation from God in the Franciscan order. Something given up and then restored is the same but not just the same. It is experienced and valued differently. It is experienced as God’s gift in a more profound way.
The paradigm case in the Bible is the story of Abraham’s “sacrifice” of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. It is an endlessly fruitful story. Abraham is asked by God to give up his only and beloved son, who was not only dear to him but also the one through whom God’s wonderful promises to Abraham were to be fulfilled. The son God had given him, the heir essential to the promises God had given him—all this Abraham was to renounce for God’s sake. The test was to determine whether Abraham’s devotion to God really took precedence over everything else in his life. But when he passes the test, everything is given back to him. Isaac does not die. A key point for appreciating the significance of the story is that Isaac is now doubly given—given by God when he was conceived, given back to Abraham on the mountain—and doubly precious. In Abraham’s experience, what happened was virtually a giving of his son up to death and a receiving of him back restored to life.
What was required of Abraham was extreme, and that is why it can serve as a paradigm, with which we can align many lesser forms of sacrifice and surrender that may be required of us.5 What I did not expect when I wrote the first stanza of the poem was that my ability to read, surrendered in principle to God, should he require it, would turn out to be something restored to me beyond expectation. The danger of losing it was never as great as I feared, and the sight in my left eye did not fully recover. But it changed forever the way I experience and value my eyesight. Had I thought about it, I must always have known that sight is a remarkable faculty, given to us by God, and so is specifically the ability to read, which had been of incalculable value in my own life. But I hadn’t really thought about it. I have worn spectacles, because of my short sight, from a very early age, but that has not really made me consider how eyesight is both wonderful and fragile, dependent on the intricate but delicate mechanism of the eye. Losing central vision in my right eye made me glad to be able to rely on my left eye, but for that reason it did not shake my world and leave me trembling, as the prospect of losing central vision also in my left eye did. After the intensity of that experience, the eyesight I have is precious beyond words, and I cannot forget that I have it as the gift of God’s love.
The first stanza of this poem related a “sighting” of Jesus Christ as the Teacher of the way; the second stanza relates a “sighting” of him as the Companion on the way. It requires less commentary than the first. I am reflecting on the journey of discipleship, but with my specific vocation particularly in view, since it was my vocation that was coming to seem much more difficult in the days around my second eye injection.
The invitation to which this stanza refers was not a one-time event in my early life but refers rather to the way in which, during my teenage years, I came to take very seriously the call of the Christian to live in a way wholly orientated to God, seeking to love God above all things. The image of the Christian life as a journey in which we are accompanied by Jesus is not found explicitly in the New Testament, but is often seen as evoked by Luke’s story of the disciples on the way to Emmaus, on which they are joined in their journey by the risen Christ. However, they do not recognize him, whereas in my use of the motif here he is very much a recognized presence with me in my life. The image might also recall the book of Tobit, with which this book began. There have been many artistic representations of Tobias accompanied on his journey by the archangel Raphael, no doubt because Raphael was seen in this case as a type of Christ. But again, the companion goes unrecognized until the journey’s end, when Raphael reveals that he is an angel sent by God. My use of the image of Jesus as a companion on the way may well owe something to the work of Shusaku Endo, the Japanese Catholic novelist, who understood Jesus as the “eternal companion,” the one who had to experience in his life and death all the pain and sorrows humans go through in order to become their eternal companion, actualizing God’s love for them by accompanying them in love. For Endo, who had difficulty adapting to Western theology, this was an authentically Japanese way of knowing Christ.6 Yet it is an image that feels very natural to me, and I think many Christians will recognize it as true to at least one aspect of their relationship with God in Christ.
The stanza focuses on the experience of facing unusual difficulty on the way, as it becomes steep. It is important that Jesus as companion do more than accompany. He must share the load to make it possible for me to continue. I did not entertain the possibility of discontinuing the journey, not because I was subject to some divine compulsion but because I had committed myself irrevocably to the way of discipleship. Jesus’s “duress” means his insistence that following the way entails this uphill struggle. There is no easy way around it available.
This stanza has no scriptural allusions. But now I realize there are some resemblances to John Bunyan’s account of Christian’s ascent of the Hill Difficulty in The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is more than twenty years since I last read the book, but maybe some unconscious memory of it was at work when I wrote the poem. In any case, it provides an interesting text for comparison with mine, although it lacks the theme of Jesus as companion on the way that is a key element in my stanza. Here are the relevant parts of Bunyan’s narrative:
I believe then, that they all went on till they came to the foot of an Hill, at the bottom of which was a Spring. There was also in the same place two other ways besides that which came straight from the Gate; one turned to the left hand, and the other to the right, at the bottom of the Hill: but the narrow way lay right up the Hill, (and the name of the going up the side of the Hill, is called Difficulty.) Christian now went to the Spring and drank thereof to refresh himself, and then began to go up the Hill; saying,
This Hill, though high, I covet to ascend,
The difficulty will not me offend:
For I perceive the way to life lies here;
Come, pluck up, Heart; lets neither faint nor fear:
Better, tho difficult, th’ right way to go,
Then wrong, though easie, where the end is wo.
The other two also came to the foot of the Hill. But when they saw that the Hill was steep and high, and that there was two other ways to go . . . they were resolved to go in those ways. . . .
I looked then after Christian, to see him go up the Hill, where I perceived he fell from running to going, and from going to clambering upon his hands and his knees, because of the steepness of the place.7
Christian’s song reminds me of the vigorous faith that I recognized in “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” and that I believe I was given to see me through the crisis.
The third stanza was written later, after my eyesight had significantly recovered and during a short holiday I took, based in Canterbury. It was on a visit to the lovely medieval town of Sandwich, one of the old Cinque Ports, that I composed this stanza. I was sitting, I remember, in bright sunshine outside a hotel where I had some lunch. The sunshine appears in the penultimate line of the stanza.
The stanza takes up images of peril and deliverance that are frequent in the Psalms, where deep waters often represent dangerous or even evil forces that threaten the psalmist. The psalmist is being overwhelmed by or sinking in these waters until the Lord draws him out and sets him on firm ground.8 I did not have a particular psalm in mind, and I did not have the Psalms available to me when I wrote the stanza. So I was reimagining this imagery while conscious of its strong background in the Psalms and of the fact that these psalmists praise and thank the Lord for their deliverance from extreme dangers.
The image of God stilling the sea, in the second line of the stanza, has distinctive sources (Pss. 89:9; 107:25–30). In the Hebrew Bible, only God has the power to control the raging sea (Job 38:8–11; Pss. 89:8–9; 104:6–9). But in my poem, the “Master of the deep” is Jesus Christ, and so I am also alluding to the miracle of the stilling of the storm in the Gospels (Mark 4:35–41), where the disciples’ question “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (4:41) has the implication that Jesus must be divine.
The sentence “Your arm was strong to save” came to me as though it were a reminiscence of the Psalms, and it does have a quite close parallel there (Ps. 77:15). But I think a more influential source was the hymn that begins “Eternal Father, strong to save / Whose arm hath bound the restless wave.” It is the well-known hymn “for those in peril on the sea,” which itself alludes both to God the Father’s control over “the mighty ocean deep” and to Christ’s calming of the waters.
In the last four lines I develop in my own way the idea that God delivers from the perils of the sea and sets one on firm ground. My thought here is that, after such an experience, the same is no longer the same. Life after deliverance by God is life received from God as the gift of his love. However well one might have known all along that everything is God’s gift, now this is an inescapable and joyful recognition. The place to which God restores one now features the contours of God’s love, seen “with sunlit clarity.” That phrase was given to me by the fact that I wrote the stanza sitting in bright sunlight, but it was also prophetic. Although I was glad of the extent to which I could now see well, it would be later that I was struck by the greater clarity that resulted from the fuller effects of the eye injections.
1. Richard Bauckham, “Weakness—Paul’s and Ours,” Themelios 7, no. 3 (1982): 4–6. This article can be accessed at https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_weakness_bauckham.html.
2. Matt. 10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; 17:33; John 12:25.
3. I use “their” as a common gender singular possessive pronoun, a practice that is now widely accepted. Some modern translations (such as the NRSV) avoid “his” by making the subject plural (“those who”), but biblical aphorisms of this kind regularly refer to the individual, not the group. This is deliberate and should be reflected in the translation.
4. For example, see my essay “The Christian Way of Losing and Finding Self,” in Richard Bauckham, The Bible in the Contemporary World (London: SPCK; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 138–43.
5. Note also the extreme demands Jesus made on his disciples and the promise that what will be given is much more than what has been renounced: Mark 10:29–30.
6. See Emi Mase-Hasegawa, Christ in Japanese Culture: Theological Themes in Shusaku Endo’s Literary Works, Brill’s Japanese Studies Library 28 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 117–19.
7. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 34–35.
8. See Pss. 18:16; 40:2; 69:1–2, 14–15; 118:5; 124:4–5; also Jon. 2:2–6. In Ps. 107:25–30, the description of a dangerous storm at sea is literal.