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Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

Artlyst - Arpita Singh Social Observations Serpentine North

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on ‘Arpita Singh: Remembering’ at Serpentine North:

"The’ Golden Deer’ and ‘Searching Sita through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels’ bring all these strands together in images which, as Geeta Kapur writes, explode with warfare in “planetary wars that will annihilate the universe” and which leave “armies of kith and kin slaughtered on home ground”. The search for unattainable desires, as symbolised in The Golden Deer, is the catalyst for the violence covering the text-based maps that form the torn and dismembered worlds depicted in these works. These large works are major statements about mimetic desire and our human tendency to create and punish scapegoats."

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Watkins Family Praise - Grief And Praise.
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Sunday, 16 March 2025

On the third day I finish my work

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Catherine’s Wickford and Christ Church Wickford:

The singer-songwriter Bill Fay died recently aged 81. A very private man, he rarely performed in public, but his songs nevertheless touched the hearts of many people.

This was despite a long period, from the mid-1970s to the 2000s, where he was without a recording contract. Such setbacks didn't seem to phase him and he found other work while continuing to record his songs. Eventually, the strength of his early work, which had been overlooked at the time, brought attention back to him and he recorded three well-received albums before he died.

His life mirrored the faith and belief that he poured out in his songs. Songs which are laments for the violence and lack of care often seen in our world together with celebration of the everyday acts of love and care undertaken by ordinary people. The latter reveal God's love in the midst of difficulty and point towards a future day when love will reshape the world in the image of Jesus Christ.

In today's Gospel reading (Luke 13:31-35), Jesus, himself, is facing the forces of violence as Herod is seeking to kill him in the context of a conquered nation ruled by the Roman oppressors. His response is to continue working in the face of the threats around him and to lament the effect the oppressive forces have on the people around him.

He longs to gather those around him and shelter them from the storms of life as a mother hen does with her chicks by bringing them under her wing for warmth. In this way, he shows us the mother heart of God, which is overflowing with love towards us. Lovingly, Jesus is saying he wants to be like the mother hen gathering God’s people to him where they will then experience safety and love. At the same time that he makes this specific statement to the people of Jerusalem, he is also paying a wonderful tribute to motherhood itself by equating the love which God shows towards us to the love that mothers show towards their offspring.

This is one of several passages in scripture where God is described in feminine terms. Given the patriarchal nature of the society in which the Bible was formed, it is surprising to find any references to God as feminine and it is particularly significant to find this reference on the lips of Jesus.

The Bible tells us that God is Spirit and therefore not male or female. When human beings enter the story of creation, it is as beings made in the image of God, both male and female. So, God is ultimately not gendered in the way that we are and it is important for us to understand and celebrate the way God expresses his love through both genders.

Jesus laments here over the patterns of response in our world which see those who are different from us and have a message of change being scapegoated and killed. Scapegoating others is the way in which we consistently act as human beings. We desire something that is possessed by someone else and become disturbed through our longing for what we don’t have. We resolve our disturbance by creating a scapegoat of the person or people who appear to have or prevent us from having what it is we desire. When the scapegoat is killed, we can gain what we desire and also release the sense of disturbance that we feel.

That is what Jesus knew he was facing and his response was to double down on his work of healing and care until such time as his death came when the people would then say 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’

That change would come about because on the third day his work would be finished; the third day being the day he rose from the dead. The scapegoating and crucifixion of God is the ultimate demonstration of God's love for humanity but it is the resurrection that then changes the arc of human history away from oppression and towards peace. Jesus is resurrected as the first-fruits of a new way of life wholly characterised by love and where there is no more mourning or crying or pain.

In rising from the dead, he has gone ahead of us into the new risen body and existence that we shall experience in future when Jesus returns to this earth to fully bring God’s Kingdom into existence here. When Jesus walked the earth, he looked ahead to that future time when the Kingdom of God will be made perfect, and all suffering will come to an end. But he also announced that, because of him, there is a sense in which that Kingdom has already begun. When he healed sick people and brought good news to the poor it was a sign that the Kingdom had come. In the same way, when he overcame death by rising from the dead he became the first fruits of the Kingdom, an example of what we will all become in future.

All of this is also to be found in the songs of Bill Fay. In ‘There is a valley’ he sings:

“There is a hill near Jerusalem that wild flowers grow upon
Flowers don't speak, but they speak to each other of a crucifixion
Just because he said he was the son of God
And the fury of the moment they felt they could only silently look upon
Every city bar brawl, every fist-fight, every bullet from a gun
It's written upon the palms of the Holy One
Every city bar brawl, every fist-fight, every bullet from a gun
It's written in the palms, in the palms of the Holy One”

In ‘Still some light’ he encourages us to go on in the face of this world’s troubles because we have seen the light:

“Still some light for this frail mankind, still some hope, some end in sight
Still some light for this frail mankind, still some grace in troubled times
When this world seems like a market place, where souls are bought and sold
And it’s all to easy, for a soul to grow cold
When this world seems like a market place, where souls are bought and sold
God knows it ain’t easy, don’t give up on it all, still some light”

The light that we have seen is ‘The Healing Day’ that is still to come:

“It'll be okay
On the healing day
No more goin' astray
On the healing day
Yeah we'll find our way
On the healing day
To where the children play
On the healing day

When the tyrant is bound
And the tortured freed from his pain
And the lofty brought to the ground
And the lonely rage

Ain't so far away
That healin' day
Comin' to stay
The healing day”

In the face of violence and oppression, Jesus doubled down on his ministry of healing and his acts of love and transformation. Following in Jesus' footsteps, Bill Fay continued to sing of this world's transformation into the image of Christ despite being ignored and overlooked for many years. In a changing world where hatred of others is on the rise and where authoritarian figures are increasingly being given power to oppress, we are challenged by their examples to continue to act in the ways of love as a sign of the coming kingdom of love. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Bill Fay - Still Some Light.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 12:35 0 comments
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Sunday, 14 July 2024

Lord, disarm violence and begin with me

Here's the sermon I shared in the 9.30 am service at St Mary Magdalene Great Burstead:

In 2014, a poster for the children’s Horrible Histories stage tour attracted protests from parents. Horrible Histories, as many of you will know, describes itself as 'history with the nasty bits left in.' It is a series which has inspired millions of children to discover history because the books have ‘got ALL the yucky bits and foul facts that other books leave out.’

The posters, advertising the 'Barmy Britain' tour, featured a big picture of an executioner holding an axe and a bloody head and were labelled as being in 'shockingly bad taste' by furious parents in the wake of the beheading of Western hostages by ISIS militants. A father-of-two from Chelmsford, said: 'The posters are shocking in light of the recent events in the news and in really bad taste. The pictures are meant to be showing events in history, but sadly beheadings are still going on and are all too real.’ Neal Foster, director and producer of the show, said: 'It is unfortunate and we are sympathetic to anyone who is offended by the poster, but it was designed in July 2013, a long time before these recent incidents came to attention.’

These responses were interesting because they seem to suggest that as long as the nasty events of history are kept firmly in the past, we can enjoy history with all the foul facts left in but as soon as those same events feature in our present, we have a problem with showing and viewing them.

I wonder whether the same holds true for similarly violent Biblical stories such as today’s Gospel reading about the beheading of John the Baptist (Mark 6.14-29). How do we understand such passages? Should they be censored, as happened to the ‘Barmy Britain’ posters? Do we find the blood and gore attractive, repulsive, or are we immune to it?

The first thing I want to say in the light of all this is that the Bible does not give us a sanitised version of violence. If anything, the reverse is the case and the Bible can easily be seen, like the Horrible Histories, as full of blood and gore. There is realism in our Scriptures about nature, and human nature in particular, being red in tooth and claw. This realism sees each one of us as having the potential for violence, whether we ascribe that to sin or the survival of the fittest. As studies examining complicity in the Holocaust tend to show, those involved were not monsters, ‘beasts or aliens’ and the overwhelming brutality involved appeared to arise easily ‘in the context of 1930s Germany, with its background of economic depression, political disenchantment and frustrated nationalist sentiment’. This suggests that we are all actually at different points on the same continuum between peace and violence and the saying, 'there, but for the grace of God, go I' carries a profound truth about which we need to be honest and repentant.

Our complicity with violence often leads us to make God over in our own violent image. Bob Dylan described this tendency well in the song ‘With God on our Side’. We begin with the belief that the land that we live in has God on its side and from there we interpret every change and challenge in our history as indicating that God is truly on our side. This, as Dylan notes in the 5th verse, can lead to the confusions of changing sides in war and peace. So, during the Second World War we believed that the German nation did not have God on their side but once the War ended and there was reconstruction with the German nation becoming our allies that changed and they now had God on their side, despite all that had previously occurred during the war.

Our human tendency to believe that God is on our side pervades the Old Testament and can be described as the core testimony about God. As this core testimony sees God as being on our side, it legitimizes and justifies our national interests. In this way of thinking our enemies are God's enemies and we petition him in prayer to smite and destroy those who are our and, therefore, also his enemies.

Also found in the Old Testament, however, is a counter testimony which, at times, can seem overwhelmed or submerged by the core testimony but which is, nevertheless, a thread running throughout scripture. The counter testimony says that God, rather than being about power and rather than being on the side of those in power, is actually most concerned about those who are crushed by the power-mongers of this world; those who are victims, those who are poor, those who are powerless, those who are excluded, those who are scapegoats.

These two testimonies about God are both present throughout the Bible with the core testimony often appearing dominant. But, we believe, at a particular point in human history God himself entered human history in the person of Jesus in order to show us in actions and words just what God is actually like. In Jesus, the counter testimony becomes prominent as Jesus lives, teaches, dies and rises not only as an example of compassion toward those who are victims, excluded and scapegoated but also becomes a victim, becomes excluded, becomes a scapegoat himself. When God is revealed in human history it is as a victim of violence, not as a perpetrator of violence.

God's revelation in Jesus continues a subversion of the human story of violence that actually began in the Old Testament. René Girard suggests that the story of Cain and Abel reveals the way in which we consistently act as human beings. We desire something that is possessed by someone else and become disturbed through our longing for what we don’t have. We resolve our disturbance by creating a scapegoat of the person or people who appear to have or prevent us from having what it is we desire. When the scapegoat is killed, we can gain what we desire and also release the sense of disturbance that we feel.

That is what we see acted out in the story of Herodias and Salome. The privileges that Herodias and Salome enjoy seem to be threatened and they identify John the Baptist as the threat to their continued enjoyment of their desires. John is therefore scapegoated and killed to remove their sense of threat.

This pattern becomes expressed in religions involving human sacrifices as scapegoats to appease their gods. It is out of such religions that Abraham is called to form a people who do not sacrifice other human beings, but instead use animals as their scapegoats and sacrifices. Jesus is later born into this people who have subverted the existing practice of scapegoating and he further subverts this practice because, as he is crucified, God becomes the scapegoat that is killed.

The crucifixion is, therefore, the logical outcome of the incarnation. To use the language of Sam Well's, Nazareth Manifesto, God is not simply for victims. God is with victims, because God is a victim. God is not simply for the excluded. God is with the excluded, because God is excluded. God is not simply for those who are scapegoated. God is with scapegoats, because God is a scapegoat. When God is scapegoated, there is no longer any god to appease and the necessity for scapegoating is superceded, subverted and eradicated.

This is the reality in which Christianity calls us to live. A world beyond Horrible Histories, beyond scapegoating, beyond victimisation and beyond exclusion. A world in which the mechanisms for justifying and acting out our violent desires have been dismantled and rendered null and void. A world, as Barbara Brown Taylor has said, in which we ‘keep deciding not to hate the haters, … keep risking the fatal wound of love and teaching others to do the same — because that is how we prepare the ground around us to receive the seeds of heaven when they come’.

‘Violence did not surprise Jesus. He was prepared for it, and he tried to prepare his followers as well but few of them had ears to hear.’ ‘Even before the violent had come for him, he knew what had happened to God’s messengers in the past: silenced, exiled, outlawed, killed …Then King Herod threw John the Baptist in prison … and Jesus had to say it all over again: expect violence; prepare for it; never underestimate the harm it can do.’

Are we similarly prepared? Do we know ‘the power to resist the deadly force of violence’ by doing what Jesus taught and practised: ‘turn the cheek, pray for the persecutor, love the enemy, welcome the stranger. In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.’ Are we willing, like John the Baptist and Jesus, to be prophets who can see and name what does not belong with us and can shine the light of God’s truth in the night-time of fear and oppression?

If we do then our prayer must be: Lord, disarm violence and begin with me. As Barbara Brown Taylor has noted, ‘Sometimes [the power to resist the deadly force of violence] actually works to disarm the violence in others, which is why we know the names of Gandhi, Tutu, and King. But that is not its main purpose. Its main purpose is to disarm the violence in us, so that we do not join the other team.’

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Bruce Cockburn - Orders.
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Monday, 22 April 2024

Artlyst: The Last Caravaggio - National Gallery

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on 'The Last Caravaggio' at the National Gallery:

'Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, as both a revolutionary artist and a violent individual in a violent age, divides eras and opinions.

His paintings are strikingly original and emotionally charged with their intense naturalism, dramatic lighting and powerful storytelling. These elements of his work have had a lasting impact on European art and continue to reverberate to this day. His focus on the human in depicting stories of the divine reversed the idealisation of the human primarily found in the Western tradition up to that point and introduced a new language to painting, one that would eventually result in Rembrandt’s ability to reveal the divine in his sitters and characters.'

See also my first article for Artlyst - Was Caravaggio a Good Christian?

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -
Articles/Reviews -
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Gregory Porter - Revival.
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Saturday, 1 April 2023

International Times: The Black Rain

International Times, the Magazine of Resistance, have just published my short story entitled 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media.

My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect, and two stories about Nicola Ravenscroft's mudcub sculptures - 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes' and 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King'.

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Hurtsmile - Just War Theory.
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Wednesday, 23 March 2022

Artlyst - Ali Cherri: Artist in Residence National Gallery

My latest review for Artlyst is of Ali Cherri's If you prick us, do we not bleed? installation at the National Gallery:

'His installations, therefore, open up a conversation about the Gallery’s Collection, which, by spanning five centuries of Western European painting, includes a large proportion of paintings that treat specifically Christian themes and subject matter. Three of the five damaged paintings are among that group within the Collection, whilst those surrounding Cherri’s vitrines in the Sainsbury wing are predominantly so. At the centre of the Christian faith and its images is the violence of the crucifixion, alongside that inflicted on martyrs following in the footsteps of Christ. In the context of this exhibition, then, there is a discussion to be had about the depiction of violence within the Collection and within Christianity, together with explorations of the extent to which Christ’s passion seeks to unmask systems of violence and the extent to which the Church has been complicit in such systems.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -
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Leonard Cohen - Who By Fire.
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