Arma Christi (III): Tuesday of Holy Week.

Lantern, Omne Bonum MS, 14th cent.

John 12:2-36

Around the Cross in the center of the great Reredos here at St Thomas' is a frame decorated with shields, or coats of arms as they are more technically known, bearing symbols that are considered Christ's own badges or trophies. These Arma Christi or instruments of the passion are objects that play a part in the story that unfolds across this week. 

The collect for this Tuesday of Holy Week says "you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life" - meaning the Cross itself, but the same applies to most of these other “instruments” too; nails, spear, crown of thorns. Yet even these are ambiguous - objects that could be employed and admired in situations where beauty, truth, and justice were on show, instead of oppression and violence and shameful death.

The shield at the lower left corner of the frame around the Cross is carved with a lantern. This seemingly benign and helpful object also appears in the story of Jesus’ passion and plays a part in his demise. All of the Gospels tell the story of Jesus' arrest in "dark Gethsemane" - of course it takes place at night. In the synoptic Gospel accounts, the disciples are sleeping, and Jesus has to rouse them as Judas and the crowd arrive; John's Gospel alone mentions an important detail that helps explain how the posse found the motley group of Galileans in the gloom of the garden, and identified their leader; they came, John says, "with lanterns and torches and weapons" (18:3) This is why the lantern too is among these "instruments of shameful death”, light in the darkness but for evil and not for good.

In his book On Christian Culture the great African theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo, writing just before the year 400, observed that we approach things and people in one of two ways: "to use," he says, or "to enjoy." To use things or people, Augustine says, is to view them purely instrumentally, and to make them serve our own unreflective interests without regard to their real value and meaning. 

In human relationships, the old-fashioned expression that someone is a "user" captures this well enough; people can use and be used, but this is wrong because they are not means to other ends; people have inherent dignity or should. Things like due process in law for all persons express as much of that recognition as secular civil society is able. We can “use” people in our inter-personal relationships, but we can also “use” them nationally and communally, as when some group such as immigrants is dehumanized and treated as a cruel spectacle to engender an illusory social coherence for the remainder.

Yet this distinction between use and enjoyment also applies to how we relate to the rest of the world. We do properly make, employ, and engage with things, food and clothes, buildings and tools, trees and books and animals and art and so much else - but when we do so without regard to the real beauty and purpose of objects, of things, we do what is unworthy of them, and of us. Our environmental challenges reflect "use" in this negative sense, as does meaningless accumulation when so many lack the things they need.

To enjoy people and things, on the other hand, is to be in relationship with them as divinely intended, where the real purpose and identity of the complex world is acknowledged and celebrated, as we employ them or participate with them in serving that true purpose. In human community, and in harmony with creation, with nature and culture, we become our truest selves enjoying creation and community and so too the gifts of God.

So Augustine asserts that all things are good in and of themselves because they are all God's creatures. And the right order of things and people, and right relationships among them, is the glory of God. We humans in particular however have freedom, and often choose to make what is good seem bad. 

A lantern exemplifies this. Good in itself, a source of light, we hold it up to see what we want to see, and then it helps us to fulfil the purpose we intend to pursue. Even among these instruments that are the props of the divine drama, the lantern has a unique ambiguity because it reveals what is the case about other things, and helps us identify them; but the truth that it reveals is not complete. Light is closely related to knowledge of course. To see is to know. Knowledge itself cannot be bad, but not all knowledge serves a good purpose. Knowledge itself can thus be used as well as enjoyed. 

The soldiers and the crowd use the lantern to see Jesus. There is an ironic parallel here with a scene in the Gospel read this evening, which is set the previous day. Some Greeks who had also come to Jerusalem as pilgrims during that last great Passover, said to Philip, "Sir, we would see Jesus." On the face of it, these people shared the same goal as the crowd in the garden, but actually wished to see what Jesus wanted to give. 

The light of truth is offered to us all, to see the world, to see one another, and to see Jesus. These instruments of the Passion remind us however that even Jesus can be either used or enjoyed. It is the nature of the incarnation that he submits to our choices; he can be the object of our own wish-fulfilment, or the source of still more light and truth. The Greeks wished to enjoy him; the bearers of the lanterns in the Garden on the other hand use them to use Jesus, to objectify him.

Sight and knowledge are themselves good, but we can make any thing we see and know into less than what they truly are, in order to manipulate them according to what we think is our own self-interest. Our lives are always a quest for sight and knowledge, but the acquisition of information is not a substitute for our moral or spiritual formation as human beings who inhabit the world as God intends any more than the acquisition of things. Light without love is not enough. Without that, our use of things--in other words our selfishness--turns out really to be self-destructive, and we ultimately do not see at all.

Truth and light however are in the end more than the ways we instrumentalize them. As we remember the events associated with this lantern, we also remember that this instrument can be the means of life; in fact it was always already so, for in the very beginning of this same Gospel, Saint John suggests that we do not merely see Jesus, we see by means of him: "What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."