Anointing

As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit – just as it has taught you, remain in him.

1 John 2.27

I have been struck by the word “anointing”. Elizabeth Bathurst (as quoted by David Johnson) wrote:

But I brought them the scriptures, and told them there was an anointing within man to teach him, and the Lord would teach them himself.

For ’tis that Spiritual Anointing that the apostle John speaks of [1 John 2.20-27], which those that have received it (and in whom it abides) needs not that any Man teach them, but as the same Anointing teacheth them all things…

We are not very used, I think, to the term among Friends today. Among charismatic Christians it is much more common, and seems to be used in both the sense of being given spiritual gifts – the New Testament “handbook” to these is 1 Corinthians 12 – and in the sense of being set aside by God for a purpose. The key passage for the latter is the beginning of Isaiah 61 (“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour…”) quoted by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry in Luke 4.18-19.

But I think Elizabeth Bathurst, following the apostle John, as she says, is using the word in a slightly different sense to either of these, and it is a sense we as Quakers should recognise. In A Quaker Prayer Life, David Johnson of Queensland Regional Meeting in Australia writes,

Many of us will also have experienced [anointing] in some small way–an experience of Divine presence that is like being gently touched, perhaps with a finger dipped in warm fragrant oil, and we feel that warmth and special inward touch, and in that moment are momentarily aware of some deep religious understanding, or of a puritying presence. That is to say, we have been anointed, and it is a sign that we have been in the eternal presence–we have known the Eternal Christ within us.

Is not much of our work in our meetings rightly directed to showing this possibility to Friends, leading them gently to recognise it in themselves, however they may choose to describe it? It is the source of our ministry, as well as our comfort, and the beginning of all our leadings; it is always to be found in silence.