Vergine Madre, Figlia del tuo Figlio

A bit early, but I'm off down to darkest Somerset for work tomorrow, so here it is:

10 May 2009 - Fifth Sunday of Easter

You in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person

I suppose you could sum up today’s Gospel in the phrase “and the Word was made flesh”. It is not so much “the Word is flesh”, even after the union of the two natures in Christ, and you can’t quite say “flesh is the Word”, though maybe that would be a good corrective to our almost Manichean fear and contempt for the body. Ever since Christ died, death has not only lost its sting, but it has become something beautiful and even precious (oh yes, I have seen people die, and I know it doesn’t always look like that; but then, neither did Christ’s death). The same is far more true of life – life in the flesh on this earth, I mean. People travel for hundreds, even thousands of miles to touch or even to see relics that have been used or touched by a saint or which made up part of her body; we have all heard about the statue of St Peter in Rome whose foot has been worn away by the pilgrims’ constant caresses. There’s another, by the way, in the Brompton Oratory. But why just speak of saints? Consider the popularity of houses where great people have lived, or museums which contain their clothing or possessions: the frisson that goes through you when you are allowed to touch the piano that Chopin once played. The fact that these things once had some contact with these great people – great in whatever fashion – invests them with a special value. But it doesn’t seem to strike us that ever since Christmas our life, our very flesh, and since Easter our death, has been invested with a far more special nature, because the One with whom it has had contact is divine; is God.

In a group discussion during my time at Cambridge, our philosophy tutor suddenly demanded: “Where are you?” We looked at each other, uncertain as to what he was on about. Finally a brave soul piped up: “We’re in your rooms at King’s College.” “No, no,” cried Dr Lloyd. “I mean where are YOU, where is YOU, where in your body do you feel YOU reside? Is it here –“ and he gave the unfortunate young man a cuff on the head, “and if not, where?” I think we all agreed that we felt we “were” in our heads. I’m not sure whether I would feel that quite so strongly if I were blind: the eyes are our windows on to the world, and it seems logical that “I” should be behind my windows, looking out. Of course our ears, and our senses of taste and smell are also in our heads, but I do feel that “I am “ behind my eyes. However, if I asked myself “where” I feel my source of life to be, I would reply “in the region of my heart”. Which is, mechanically speaking, correct: that’s the engine room, and the captain is up in my brain. certainly the further from my heart a part of my body is, the less life-threatening an injury seems; and the further from my brain it is the less it feels like an essential part of me; while it would be inconvenient to lose one of my feet, I would not feel it affected my being; while damage to my face would feel like damage to “me”. Well, I’m not sure that “I” am in my brain; but I am very sure indeed that the source of my life is not in my heart. When Paul says “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me” that is not a pious allegory. It is literally true. Since the Incarnation “all flesh” is the Body of Christ. The Word was made flesh, and flesh can never be the same again.

My source of life is not within myself. I am not an independent plant, entire by itself, that has only to be rooted in the soil to live. I am part of the one plant, and if I do not receive the sap from it, I wither and die. Any idea of self-sufficiency is pure illusion, not because some tyrant God wishes to keep me in subjugation, but because apart from him there is no life. I am free within the vine, but only within it. But there’s another side to that: if I am in the vine, I cannot die, any more than Christ, once risen, can die. My participation in the vine is not a fiction. If I cannot live outside it, that is because its life – God’s own life – is mine. Christ is the vine, but so am I; apart from the fact that you can cut off the vine’s branches without killing the vine, you cannot distinguish between vine and branches. If that isn’t being deified, I don’t know what it is.

Of course another thing that means is this: you cannot prune the branches without pruning the vine. If one of the branches is cut out, or even pruned, Christ feels it: not “as if” it were himself but because it quite literally is himself. To say “the vine” and “the branches” is more or less synonymous. If I spray the vine’s branches, I spray the vine. It is far more than Paul’s “head and members”, as there there is a genuine distinction: if I cut my hand I do not in any sense cut my head. You talk about pruning the rosebush, not about pruning the branches of a rosebush. It is meaningless to say “I didn’t prune the bush, I only pruned the branches”. At most, you could say “I pruned part of the bush”, but that wouldn’t in fact give an accurate impression of what you actually did. So “I am the vine, you are the branches” is really a form of the Hebrew parallelism which you find, for example, in the phrase “What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou considerest him?” There is no distinction between “man” and “the son of man”. The two are the same. I am Christ and Christ is me. He said so: he said that whatever we do to the least of his brethren, we do to him. He did not say “It is as if you had done it to me”; but “You did it to me”. We are in Paschaltide, so perhaps I shouldn’t point out what the cost of this is to our Lord, but we wouldn’t have Paschaltide without the Passion, so here goes: when the Father prunes the branches, he prunes the vine. He prunes the Son. I think that was what was happening in Gethsemane. It would be meaningless to say “I’m going to prune the branches because they have curly-leaf disease (in our case, sin) but I am not going to prune the vine – Christ – because it hasn’t (in his case, he is sinless). If you prune the branches you prune the vine. A person damned is part of the vine – of Christ – cut away and burned. So, of course, is pruning, but that is health and life giving. Christ feels it, not in sympathy, but in himself. It is far more than any person could feel for any other, because it is not other, but self.

Perhaps the only person who could fully understand this was Mary. Not because she was supernaturally enlightened – maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t – and not because, being sinless, she would have been more conscious of her likeness to the Vine. But simply because she had experienced a paradox that no-one else ever can: she had been, literally and physically, the source of life, not just of any embryo, but of God. It is impossible that she should not have meditated on her extraordinary pregnancy, extraordinary not just in the manner of its beginning but in its very nature. She was the source of life for the one who was the source of life. As she felt her own blood being pumped around her veins and knew that her child, a separate person from the very instant of his conception as we all are, was being sustained in life by the beating of her heart and the flow of her blood, she must have been aware that the converse was also true, and that if – so to speak – God’s Heart, God’s love which is his being, were to cease to beat, she would cease to be, as surely as her child would do if her heart were to stop. And as she felt her life flowing through her body she knew that in some sense it was God’s life, and that she, although a separate and independent person, was in some way part of God. It was her Son who expressed it, but – and I am sure this is not the only example, it was Mary, the Virgin Mother, daughter of her Son, who first felt it.

Blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it!