I’m sorry to say that I was not very familiar with Saint Thomas Becket (also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury) until recently. He’s quite an important English saint with a famous memorial altar in Canterbury Cathedral that marks the spot of his martyrdom (seen in the header image). His shrine is also the place to which the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are traveling and sharing their stories. The liturgist Richard Giles feels that Saint Thomas should be the patron saint of England.

Thomas Becket (sometimes “Thomas a Becket”) was the archbishop of Canterbury in the late 1100s. He was the son of a Norman family and managed, with great ambition, to become a highly valued member of Henry II’s inner court. The king saw an opportunity when Archbishop Theobald Bec died. Henry figured he could appoint a kind of ringer in the senior office of the Church in England, and so he managed to get Thomas appointed—despite the fact that Thomas was not ordained to any clerical office at the time. Within days, Thomas was ordained deacon, priest, then bishop in order to take charge of the archbishopric. He came to this office in the midst of a time when the English monarchy was attempting to both exert further control over the church and gain further independence from Rome. But Thomas had a fairly dramatic conversion experience as a result of his impromptu ordinations and wound up eschewing the vainglory of the royal court in favor of faithfulness to the Church. Once Henry’s close friend, he became a thorn in the side of the king and was regularly opposing him on church-related issues, even threatening excommunication at one point.

The story goes that Henry II, in a fit of frustration (and after Becket had been allowed to return from a multi-year exile in France), exclaimed among some of his advisors and knights “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest” (or some variation of this). Four of his knights took this as an order and made plans to assassinate Saint Thomas in the Cathedral. He was stabbed multiple times while Vespers was being chanted, the events expressed in gory detail by one of the monks wounded in the attack.

There are complicated elements in Saint Thomas’ story that carry overtones we still deal with today. Becket wanted “secular” legal systems to have limited authority over the clergy, preferring that the Church handle its own affairs. Such a practice has come to a head in the early 21st century where we’ve seen that when the Church is left to its own devices in terms of addressing clerical crimes, justice becomes elusive. However, at the same time, we also see the dangers inherent in a system where a government exerts control and influence over the Church. Becket was a champion of the established models of medieval Christendom, where monarchs were understood to be under the authority of the Church, with bishops serving as a kind check on kingly power. Henry II did not want to be held in such check and his frustrations with this idea ultimately led to the death of a beloved archbishop.

Thomas’ assassination is of a piece with other notable Christian leaders who attempted to challenge worldly power with the power of the gospel. Oscar Romero is one example, assassinated during Mass by right-wing political figures. Martin Luther King Jr. is, of course, another—assassinated because he became a more vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam and was beginning to shift his advocacy toward the exploitation of the working poor. Both saw their stances as being rooted in the gospel.

Thomas is a worthy saint for our consideration and devotion in our time. There is much pressure put on the Church (in all her forms) to capitulate to worldly powers. The radical right movements like MAGA and their ilk are the most current (and perhaps most egregious), but I’ve seen such pressure come from the left-side of things as well. Having grown up in a church quite given to right-wing political and social evils, I’m loathe to see a similar thing happen with more “progressive” churches like the Episcopal Church, where subscription to partisan talking points becomes seen as synonymous with “the gospel.” Indeed, I am of the conviction that faithfulness to Jesus Christ and His gospel will result in frustration from all forms of political partisanship. Jesus is one who disturbs worldly power, not one who makes it feel comfortable. If the Venn Diagram of one’s partisan politics and their theology is a circle, there’s a problem.

It is said that Thomas was prayerful and pious even as he was being struck by the swords. When the knights entered the cathedral, the monks wanted to bolt themselves in the sacristy for safety but Thomas would not let them. “It is not right to make a house of prayer into a fortress,” he said. After the third blow with a sword, one of the survivors of the attack recalled Becket as saying: “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church, I am ready to embrace death.”

Saint Thomas of Canterbury was willing to face death rather than capitulate; choosing the assassin’s blade over easy comforts provided by temporal power. When his body was removed from the nave of the cathedral and his episcopal vestments removed, his fellow monks discovered that Thomas wore a hair shirt underneath it all—a garment of great discomfort and used for spiritual discipline and penance. It was a sign of the deep devotion this man had. Do I have the same level of devotion? Do you? How willing are we to hold to the gospel that’s been handed down to us in the face of pressure, coercion, even death? This is a challenging question.

Faithfulness is not always easy. Saint Thomas, like Saint John and Saint Stephen before him, testifies to this fact. The powers of this world are more than ready to execute anyone in service of their claims to power—the testimony of which Saint Thomas shares with the Holy Innocents.

Again, the Christmas season is not all garlands, tinsel, gifts, and lights. It is also blood and travail. This dichotomy is quite strikingly expressed in the hauntingly gorgeous Christmas hymn “A stable lamp is lighted.” I have us sing this hymn every Christmas Eve as a reminder that Christmas leads us to Easter, but we have Good Friday as an unavoidable stop along the way. The first verse of the hymn is a beautiful exposition on the Nativity story:

A stable lamp is lighted whose glow shall wake the sky; the stars shall bend their voices, and every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry, and straw like gold shall shine; a barn shall harbour heaven, a stall become a shrine.

But the third verse takes us to Calvary:

Yet he shall be forsaken, and yielded up to die; the sky shall groan and darken, and every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry for gifts of love abused; God's blood upon the spearhead, God's blood again refused.

The saints of the first week of Christmas embody this tragic element. The babe in the manger will ultimately, despite His dedicated following and popularity, be rejected because He usurps the status quo, overturns the way-things-are. Certain people will “come and adore Him” only to a point. So long as He stays in that manger, things are fine. It’s only when He grows and enters a house of prayer to drive out corruption that certain people begin to reconsider their love and commitment of Him.

The final verse of “A stable lamp is lighted” offers us a powerful closing word:

But now, as at the ending, the low is lifted high; the stars shall bend their voices, and every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry in praises of the child by whose descent among us the worlds are reconciled.

In the end, as Saint John testified, the way-things-are will ultimately fall away to a world made as new. The sorts of powers that kill innocents and saints will be unmade and the world will be set as it was made to be.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Church #England #Episcopal #Anglican #Christian #Theology #History

When it comes to the parable known as “the Good Samaritan,” we tend to do some weird things. First, we call it “the Good Samaritan” oblivious to the implication that we’re basically calling this “the parable about ‘one of the good ones’” (change “Samaritan” to any other ethnic designation and you’ll see what I mean). Secondly, we conflate the care shown to the unnamed victim with the Samaritan as though Jesus is telling us to extend care even to people we find “unclean.”

The story begins with a lawyer doing a very lawyer-y thing: attempting to clarify terms. This lawyer (in this case, a person dedicated to the study and interpretation of Jewish religious law, perhaps with a focus on its social dimensions rather than its ritual/religious ones) is said to “tempt” or test Jesus by asking Him how he can attain eternal life. Jesus replies with the summary of the Torah that He elsewhere calls “the greatest commandment”: love God with everything and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.

To which the lawyer asks: “who is my neighbor?”

Jesus then gives a parable about a guy traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho (there’s nothing in the gospel to tell us where Jesus is when He delivers this parable, so I’d like to believe He’s in Jericho and is making a sly reference to the likely-from-Jerusalem lawyer who traveled just to pester Jesus with these questions). The guy gets robbed, beat-up, left for dead. We’re told that a Jewish priest crosses to the other side of the road and ignores the guy. This is followed by a “Levite” (from the historical priestly caste themselves, given prominent roles in the temple) who does the same. Then comes a Samaritan.

Now, I’m not going to assume that you know what a Samaritan is (and I say “is” here because Samaritans are still around). It’s a bit complicated, but they trace their roots to pre-kingdom Israel. They rejected the establishment of worship outside of Mount Gerizim as illegitimate, following developments began by the high priest Eli (the one who adopted Samuel). As a result, they reject many religious and cultural developments during the Kingdom period—including any “scriptures” written beyond the Torah (the “legal” books, the first five books of the Old Testament). This fostered centuries of animosity, made all the more pronounced by the fact that Samaritans never faced the exiles that the two kingdoms of Jews experienced. This led to them being treated as akin to “Gentiles” in many cases. But the two groups share the Torah and many cultural traditions. They also have their own priesthood and interpreters of the Law. Which means that it’s possible Jesus’ fictional Samaritan is a member of the Samaritan clergy, being held alongside his “peers” in the Jewish religion.

What this means is that all three figures who encounter the victim are subscribers to the same legal injunctions. They all would agree that “love God; love neighbor” is the most important commandment. They would also all likely agree that caring for an injured person takes precedent over other ritual/legal issues.

See, the common interpretation of this story is that the priest and Levite are ignoring their obligations to help a person in need because it risks rendering them ritually impure by exposure to blood, etc. And I think that this is where we see the conflation with the victim and the Samaritan because we are conditioned to focus on the “uncleanness” aspects of the story. The Samaritan helps the “unclean” bloodied person because he is already “unclean” himself—he has nothing to lose! But the Samaritan holds to the exact same ritual purity codes as the other priest and Levite. Though those two see him as unclean, he does not. Rather, he’s the one who’s doing a better job of following the Torah’s teachings about mitzvot.

We can only speculate about the reasons for the other two guys’ refusal to help the victim. They could be concerned about ritual purity, but Jesus depicts them as leaving Jerusalem, implying that their ritual duties are over. Martin Luther King, Jr. notes in one of his speeches that this road was a dangerous road and it would not be out of the ordinary for robbers to leave a bloodied victim in order to lure more people into a trap to be robbed. If this is the case, then the priest and Levite are (perhaps justifiably?) concerned for their safety and following a sort of conventional wisdom. Regardless, both views underscore that the Samaritan assumes a degree of risk to help this guy—either ritual purity or personal safety.

He cleans and dresses the guy’s wounds, loads him on his own animal, and takes him to an inn (risking derision by entering a Jewish city to do so). He pays and then offers to pay more until the guy is completely well.

This is when Jesus puts a question back to the lawyer: which of the three was a neighbor?

Notice that Jesus isn’t asking “can you stomach caring for an unclean person?” He’s instead getting the guy to see an example of neighborliness that goes beyond the artificial categories of “priest” and “Levite” and “Samaritan.”

Notice also that Jesus never once uses the word “good.” This isn’t about how to be a good neighbor. This is a story about how to just be a neighbor. There are no degrees when it comes to neighborliness.

Jesus adds the layer of “Samaritan” to the story in order to challenge the guy who claims to know “the rules” but these “rules” have a tendency to bias him toward certain people. And this challenges us because we tend to slap descriptors and adjectives on people in some bullshit quest to define them as deserving of our love and care. Jesus exposes that labels are just labels; actions are what define a person.

The priest and the Levite are guys who are supposed to know the rules better than anyone else. The Samaritan? He plays fast and loose with the rules—to the mind of the priest and Levite and even the lawyer himself, if he took the rules seriously he’d not be a Samaritan. But the priest and Levite, using some unknown excuse, abdicate their responsibility to help a person in need whereas the Samaritan actually takes the rules seriously—he is the one who manages to see himself in the victim and thus fulfill the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Who was a neighbor to the victim? “The one who demonstrated mercy toward him,” says the lawyer.

***

I’m writing about this parable because it’s been on my mind since reading about the number of supposedly “Christian” educational institutions expelling kids for various LGBTQ-related things. Either refusing them diplomas days before graduation because they came out or brought a trans-person with them to prom. So many “Christian” individuals and institutions fail to follow Jesus’ simple command about neighborliness. I mean, according to the linked story about the girl expelled for bringing a trans boy to prom, the Georgia Baptist school she attends “claims its core values are “love for God, neighbor, and self” and “respect for people, property, and ideas.” But these are presented as simply a pile of words. Like the lawyer, they seek to define “neighbor” in ways that fit their preconceived notions rather than hear Jesus’ challenge to our arbitrary definitions.

Seriously, swap “Trans-person” in for “Samaritan” and re-read the story. Hell, make it a story about a pastor and a Christian school principle as well. The meaning still stands: who is the neighbor?

The one who demonstrated mercy.

“Go and do likewise,” Jesus says.

#Christian #Theology #Bible #Episcopal #Church #trans #faithfulness #LGBTQ

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.