Close To The Heart

April 17, 2019

Wednesday in Holy Week

With such a late Easter, Christmas feels like a very long time ago. But if you cast your mind back to Christmas Eve, I’m sure you will have gathered here for midnight mass and heard the reading from John’s Gospel about the beginning of the story of Jesus. Indeed, John’s Gospel tells us that the Jesus story begins, not in a manger at Bethlehem but at the beginning of time. “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being.”

And we heard, in that reading, of the total spiritual union of Jesus and the Father, that Jesus came to us from his state of being “close to the Father’s heart.” In the King James Version the phrase is that Jesus was “in the bosom of the Father.”

And now, in Holy Week, the Jesus story has come a long way. The child has grown up and become a man. Disciples have been called. The sick have been healed. Crowds have gathered and listened. Friendships have been formed, friends who now gather in the upper room for their Passover meal. And through all of that, the love that Jesus, the eternal Word of God, received from the dawn of time at the heart of the Father has been shared. In teaching, in healing, in talking, in laughing, in crying, in loving, we see on the pages of the gospels the living out of the life of God with us in Jesus Christ. The spiritual union of the Trinity has been opened up into a spiritual union with humanity.

And the culmination of this is symbolized in John’s Gospel on the night before Jesus died by the physical intimacy of Jesus with his disciple. “One of his disciples – the one whom Jesus loved – was reclining next to him.” Again, in the King James Version, the phrase is “leaning on Jesus’ bosom.” So John’s Gospel begins with Jesus in the bosom of the Father. It culminates at the Last Supper with the humanity that Jesus loves in the bosom of the Lord.

This disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, is often taken to be the John after whom the Gospel is named. This beloved disciple is the one to whom Jesus entrusts his own mother from the cross and he is often depicted in paintings and sculptures of the crucifixion. But the disciple is not named. We don’t actually know who he is. And some more postmodern commentators suggest that, in fact, this figure represents the reader. The beloved disciple, the one who is close to the heart of the Lord, is us. Or at least, it could be.

For us, the physicality of this image of resting against the chest of Jesus, can only be a metaphor for spiritual union in prayer. We know from our own relationships that true intimacy is only built through spending time alone with someone. Of course we get to know Jesus in Church, just like we can get to know someone at a party. But we only develop an intimate friendship, over time, in private.

That’s why private prayer is essential for the fullness of Christian life. I won’t say you can’t be a Christian if you only come to Church and don’t have regular habits of prayer. But you’re preventing Jesus from getting as close to you as he desires and from forming you into as full a disciple a you might be. The eternal Word of God has more to offer you than you can receive in church on Sundays. We need to spend time with him daily and lean on his bosom.

So you are Jesus’ beloved disciple. And this image of resting against his chest is a metaphor for spiritual union achieved only through prayer. But as we think about the physical intimacy of that image it does at least raise some questions about the ways we might experience Christ in others and some challenges to the way in which the Christian tradition has sometimes opposed prayer and physical intimacy.

The New Testament describes Jesus’ love for the Church – for us – with the metaphor of marriage. And what is described in the marriage service as a reflection of this mystical union is a complex two-way analogy. We can understand God’s love for us with this metaphor. But marriage is a sacrament because it is also an instrument of God’s grace. Our loves, our intimacies, our commitments are all ways in which we can encounter Christ as living prayers in our daily lives.

So prayer is time alone with Jesus. That’s essential. But it is also learning to encounter the love of God in those with whom we are intimate, as friends and lovers. Because that is the mystery of the Word made flesh. The one whose love for humanity is poured out as he shares his life in fellowship and his death for us all on the cross.