But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near.’ Photo: Camp in Gaza courtesy of Care International
Breaking camp: James Gordon’s ‘divina lectio’
‘I wondered about the wilderness camps to which the earliest Christians fled.’
As a Christian-shaped Quaker, I sometimes perform a procedure learned from my Catholic mother. I take a valued book, open it at random, and put a pin in a passage. Anglicans who use the New Testament in this way refer to it as ‘divina lectio’, one of the rules of Benedict of Nursia. Using this method with my Greek Bible recently, I fingered Luke 21:20, where Jesus predicts the ‘end times’. I once believed that biblical prophesy of this kind was in conflict with Quakerism, and felt secretive – guilty even – about holding these apparently irreconcilable sets of beliefs. But more recently I read that early Friends had no such conflict, and even that George Fox made the book of Revelations central to his understanding – it was the only book that he ever wrote a commentary on.
In the Authorised Version the passage says ‘But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near.’ It continues: ‘Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those who are in the midst of her depart, and let not those who are in the country enter her.’
For ‘armies’, my Greek Bible has ‘στρατοπέδων’ (stratopédon) which means ‘camps’, though admittedly from two roots: the first ‘strato’ meaning army; the ‘pedon’ bit meaning ‘plain, ground, or earth’.
In Latin, this ‘pedon’ bit becomes ‘campus’ – the places that have been occupied by student protestors in recent weeks. Camps usually also connote ‘tents’, such as those now covering Gaza, the only places where surviving Palestinians are able to shelter.
I wondered about the ‘wilderness camps’ to which the earliest Christians fled. Might these camps, inspired by the prophet Amos, also be covered by the word ‘stratopeda’? Despite its clear military overtones, might it have been a translation of whatever term Jesus actually uttered (which would have been in Aramaic)? Could Jesus’ prophecy have been about people besieging Jerusalem to protest its government’s immoral behaviours, rather than some army of anti-Christs starving Jerusalem into submission, or attacking it, as I had always pictured? Tents these days are as much part of the equipment of charities as of armies. This is a comparatively modern development, which would not have occurred to ancient Greeks or Romans, or to anyone before the nineteenth century, when organisations such as the Red Cross began.
Friends, are we, with others of like mind – such as the courageous and determined young people in those campuses, together with an overwhelming majority of UN members – the ones surrounding Jerusalem with metaphorical ‘camps’? Are we/they perhaps fighting (I can think of no better word, though we do it nonviolently)by the ‘words of their mouth’? Could this be at least one possible meaning of that most perplexing but central of Christian beliefs, the Second Coming? Friends, I fervently hope so.
Comments
“Lectio divina” is an ancient spiritual practice, involving a slow and contemplative reading of a passage from scripture. But I’ve never come across the suggestion that it involves picking a passage at random in the way that the author describes. There’s certainly nothing in the Rule of St Benedict that suggests this.
By tpittpayne on 21st June 2024 - 10:19
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