Heart of my own Heart

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

HEART OF MY OWN HEART: Dr Raymond Pelly

Revelation 22:1-5,17

One rainy day at home we were doing drawings with the kids on the kitchen table. As they got warmed up, we said ‘let’s draw God’, a subject on which children often have creative ideas. My daughter Hester, no more than seven or eight at the time, got a big piece of paper and a crayon and started drawing. The result: something like a broken king. You could tell it was a king from the crown; but everything else was far from kingly – a kid’s commentary on the shifting status of men in our time – me in particular? But what was really striking about this broken king was that one whole side of this king was open. We asked her why she hadn’t joined up the outline. She said (with astonishing insight), ‘the whole problem with God is how God can get out of God and how we can get into God’. Hence the open side; in a nutshell, the meaning of Good Friday.

For the way St.John tells the story of the cross is similar: the crucified Jesus is the open side of God. In his open, wounded side we see how God (through the person of Jesus) gets outside God; and how we, once united to Christ, can get drawn into God. First there is this great outpouring of God’s life and love, symbolized by blood and water. One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water flowed out. 19:34; cp. I Jn 5:6. Then there is the drawing in, the embracing, the divine welcoming, the hospitality. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

This picture of Jesus as the open side of God, the cross-over point between us, humankind, and God, the abyss of love that God is, corresponds to the way Jesus is understood in St. John’s Gospel. In his dialogue with the Samaritan women, Jesus declares, Those who drink the water that I give will never thirst. It will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. 4:14. Three chapters later we read, Jesus cried out, Let anyone who is thirsty come to me. As was said, Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water. 7:38.

The accent is on the ‘shall’. It’s as if all this life, giving onto the very life of God, is – so to speak – locked up in Jesus. In this scenario, the cross is how Jesus is broken open so that all the life, the love of God, central to his being, is poured out, given, made available to all people at all times and in all places. The passage continues, Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified i.e. not yet crucified in such a way that the true glory of God was to be revealed.

To grasp this, we have to understand that ‘God’ – in John’s vision – means the eternal overflowing (or outflowing) of love that, as the Holy Spirit, is released on the cross. This takes us to the heart of the mystery of God. For the love that is released, this giving and receiving of love – the open side of God - is the very giving and receiving of love between Father and Son at the heart of the divine life itself in eternity. Once again, the cross is how God gets out of God, how we get into God. Giving and receiving.

But, as Paul makes clear, this is not about spectatoring or merely observing, but about participation or sharing. In his Letter to the new Christians in Galatia he writes, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Now Christ is heart of my own heart. It’s as though the old, self-centred, unloving ego has been ripped out of my being – we’re talking ‘crucifixion’ here, I have been crucified with Christ – and replaced by a new ‘me’, a new sense of identity, where Christ is the new and overflowing source of love at the heart of my own heart, that opens me out to the other, whether the Other be God or all the others, the people, who come my way each and every day. This is God’s cruciform gift to me personally, today and every day.

So now on Good Friday we can, if we will, make our own the prayer we have just heart from the Book of Revelation. The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come’. And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come’. And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes, take the water of life as a gift. Revelation, 22:17