Teaching by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings :-
.
Over the last few weeks, we have been discovering more and more about God’s creative and nurturing love for the world he brought into being and what this means in terms of our response, principally to God and then, as we live in his image, as those who appreciate the divine in everyday life. Today this teaching steps up any number of gears, as our writers explore the very depths of our relationship with God, indeed as the interior workings of the divine itself, which heretofore was understood by Hebrew people rather simplistically in terms of obedience, covenant and divine retribution for failure to live as God requires us to do. Today’s New Testament Readings explore this in very new ways, ways which open us to the very identity of the divine and in consequence, not just about our modelling ourselves on God, which inevitably we all fail to do most of the time, but also leaving us awe-struck at the magnitude of that divine love between Father, Son and Spirit simply as they are in themselves; and secondarily at the revelation therein of what it means to be divine and thereby smashing to bits our old misconceptions of God learned from so much of the Old Testament – yet was there long, long ago as sinful Israel constantly defied God, but was forgiven and given more and more opportunities to discover the will of God. We see this most clearly in the Exodus story, where any pagan god would have smashed them to bits and gone on to a more promising project.
We meet this corporately in our Reading from Ezekiel (18:25-28) where the prophet, speaking for God addresses the nation through the political situation of the time. They are in exile in Babylon, but the reason for their exile lies with their own folly. Israel, a vassal of Babylon, had been seduced away from this status by Egypt, which promised them support if they supported the wars of conquest of Pharaoh. As is to be expected, when the time came Egyptian forces were nowhere to be seen and a terrible retribution was wreaked on the King, his family and court. Zedekiah had grossly miscalculated the loyalty of Egypt and his family were slaughtered in consequence, and many more exiled. The prophet sees this as the result of their abandoning their faith in Yahweh and following their own sinful ways. You can read the allegory of this disaster in the great poem at Ezekiel 17. According to this prophet, the political situation is used by God, a reflection of his power and control of the cosmos and the obedience he demands.
But when we read Philippians (2:1-11), a very different picture arises. Paul spent a year in Philippi between summer 48-49CE and wrote his letter to them from prison in Ephesus sometime between C 52-54. It is possible that he sends them a known ‘Creed’ verses 6-11; for the language is not typically Paul’s but his exposition of the faith certainly is. Paul and his companions had had to leave Philippi due to persecution, but clearly they left a small thriving community behind, ready to be led onward in the faith. What is truly stunning in Paul’s introduction to the ‘Creed’ is his grasp of the meaning of the human life of Jesus as it reveals almost forensically how the life of God the Son intermeshes with ours, and the effect this has upon our behaviour. Greco-Romans were a pushy lot, upwardly mobile and willing to go to all kinds of lengths to achieve their personal advancement and in Philippi, now a veteran colony of ancient origins along with the traders of the city on the Egnatian Way, and with a nearby port, and memories of recent battles in which the dynasts of the Late Republic fought viciously for power; their behaviour frequently left a lot to be desired. Paul unwraps his Trinitarian belief of the shared love and mutual care and compassion between Christ and the Spirit as the new model for Christian life; ‘If our life in Christ means anything to you, if love can persuade at all…..be united in your love. There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self-effacing….in your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus.’ He brings this out by reciting this clear statement of belief in Christ, exploring precisely what being God the Son was about, and using a rare Greek word, harpagmon where we have ‘Did not cling to his equality with God’. The word was normally used of robbery with violence so that we get a clear picture of the equality with the Father Jesus deliberately set aside in becoming human. He becomes wholly without power ‘emptied’, as all humans in reality are in relation to God, and cast upon the world, for none of us can control his being, his destiny. Yet Jesus goes even further, since due to the manner of his life among us he incurs the wrath of the Jerusalem authorities by his confrontations with the Judaic law, his healings and his teaching which ran so contrary to the rigid morality of the temple priests, and because of the outrage this caused he suffered death – not just any execution or misfortune, but death by crucifixion. ‘In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus.’ It says a lot for the Christians of Philippi that, with all the weight of Greco-Roman culture behind them, they were thought worthy of this astounding teaching and were the recipients of so powerful a Letter. Invited to become a mirror image of Christ is the vocation of every Christian, in the communities brought into being by the Spirit working in human beings devoted to God’s service.
In our Gospel, (Matthew 21:28-32) we join Jesus in Jerusalem for Passover and his passion. In Matthew, this is the point at which Jesus ‘cleanses the Temple’, throwing out the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals which rendered the Court of the Gentiles unclean – but which made such a profit for the Temple! Questioned over his authority to behave as he does, Jesus resorts once more to teaching by a parable, that of the vineyard owner (note the vineyard for it’s always the place of the Kingdom) and we explore the behaviour of the two sons. The first refuses to comply with his father’s will, and responds disrespectfully to his father, but later thinks better of it and goes and does the work. Such an attitude to Greco-Roman fathers could have courted death, or at least being disinherited. The second son is all respectful with his seemingly gracious ‘Certainly Sir’; yet in reality he is deceitful, having no intention of doing the work. Asked which son did the will of the father the chief priests and elders, temple rulers all respond that the first son did the father’s will. Jesus responds explosively in return that ‘Tax collectors and prostitutes are making their way into the kingdom of God before you’. It is these people, low born and vulgar, the ones excluded from Temple worship as ‘sinners’, who are nearest to God because, despite their problems they are open to God; whilst these elite men, who grew fat on the illicit takings from the Temple and who knew the law about holiness, who respond with perfect civility whilst ripping off the humble, are rejected. Jesus’ fate is sealed, crucifixion is just around the corner. It is a message we all need to take to heart and a Creed which strips us bare, as we realise what God’s nature really is like.
Comments