Reflection by Frances Flatman on the Readings for next Sunday (11th in Ordinary Time)
To whom and how does God reveal himself? Ancient Judaism believed itself to be the ‘chosen’ of God, selected and favoured against all other humans and, here comes trouble, gifted the Holy Land in perpetuity. Clearly from its behaviour, Israel in the minds of many, still thinks in this way, which leaves the rest of humanity distinctly out in the cold. Arguments from DNA and other sciences, pointing to the continual overlap with Canaanite culture and the influx of foreigners over the centuries from antiquity to the present, do not seem to have shaken Israel from its preoccupation with ‘chosenness’; hence the appalling situation of the Arabs, age old residents in the same country. Those of us in the UK, inheritors of centuries of invasion and change, find the notion that God gives chunks of territory to specific groups in perpetuity very hard to swallow; and even my Japanese friends, whose islands were ‘closed’ for centuries have recognised that such exclusivism is impossible.
There can however be a sense in which people experience a powerful sense of the significance of God in their lives, and certainly this was the experience of Israel in which ancient folk memory spoke of slavery to another nation, Egypt in antiquity, and of their escape and becoming a nation as they headed for their historic country of origin. Indeed, far back in their history, they had this tradition of journeying with the stories of Abraham and his abandoning of his homeland in southern Mesopotamia, as he and his clan travelled to seek new grazing far from home. The ancient world is peppered with such resettlement myths all over the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Our Exodus story (19:2-6) picks up on this escape-journeying. Our passage fits in between the finding of God-given water and food and the giving to Moses of the 10 Commandments, with their understanding that God’s favour requires their obedience and willingness to follow the instructions that God has given them. Our text then continues with any number of rules for social cohesion and worship which most likely date to later times as the nation became established. Israel became the ‘People of the Book, the Law.’ Yet, as the Old Testament makes sadly apparent, despite all this privilege and blueprint for behaviour, Israel did not obey God’s law. Which left them with a conundrum, could they be the chosen and disobedient sinners?
Our Gospel from Matthew (9:36-10:15) pitches us into the middle of Jesus’ Galilean ministry. Matthew’s Jesus is through and through a Galilean man, his focus is far from the ultra-orthodox in Jerusalem, and he only goes there once, to confront his enemies, challenge their views of God and be put to death. Galilee in the 1st Century CE was more prosperous than Judea, had a very mixed population which included foreigners of Greco-Roman origin, and where its orthodoxy to Judaism was deemed very suspicious by the Jerusalem purists. Jesus himself had spent some time a refugee in Egypt and his teaching and healing ministry did not follow the careful divisions laid down by the law. Jesus consistently healed any in need, regardless of their being Jewish or not, as we see with the child, most likely the illegitimate son of the Roman Centurion, in Capernaum, and the pagan demoniacs in the Decapolis. Immediately before our passage, he will raise from the dead the daughter of Jairus a synagogue leader and heal the woman with the enduring issue of blood. In so many cases his touch – incurring his own defilement - is involved and we are told his response to all indiscriminately came from his deep gut-wrenching compassion (not the Jerusalem Bible ‘sorry’) which leads him to act with that outreach to others which is his model of the very nature of God himself. Here, he laments that these people, so many outcast by illness or economic distress, described as ‘like sheep without a shepherd’, have been abandoned by a Judaism which no longer seemed to reach out to the ‘chosen’, but which he saw had become self-serving and moralistic. Curiously, at this point of selecting the 12, Jesus commissions them solely for a healing ministry to Israel, regardless of his own outreach to foreigners and non-Jews. One wonders if this was in the hope that his and their ministry might reconvert Israel to what it was meant to be. Indeed, as subsequently throughout Matthew’s Gospel, as we meet Jesus in increasingly hostile debate and conflict with scribes, Pharisees and Jerusalem authorities, we rapidly come to the conclusion that this will be an unachievable aim, and other writings like the works of Paul and Acts demonstrate a rapid shift of ministry to pagans, foreigners throughout the Mediterranean.
This is best seen in the Letters of St Paul, here Romans (5:6-11). Paul, the rigid Pharisee, persecutor of Christians, rapidly changed gear with his conversion to Christ, and, insistent that the Jewish law was powerless to bring anyone to God, as all his Letters show, rapidly abandoned his Jewish law-heritage as he identified himself with Jesus. Followers of Jesus, variously described as ‘in Christ’ 150 times in the Letters, are orientated on quite a different trajectory. Unlike the Jews, who though given the law disobeyed it and remained those who believed themselves to be special – chosen - Paul grappled with the fact that without exception all human beings are sinners; all of us fail to live up to the standard set by Jesus of generosity, self-giving and outreach which he knew to be the life, the Being of the Father, and to which he dedicated his own life. Romans, Paul’s last Letter and to Christians in Rome, some Jews and others converts from paganism, is his great summing up of the meaning of Jesus as why we need his saving life, death and resurrection. He will reflect tragically on the fact of human error in its various forms, and that in fact no devotion to rules (law) can possibly clean us up. We fail again and again. Here in our Reading he explores this, recognising that we humans might, at a pinch, sacrifice ourselves for others (as Jesus did) IF they were really good. But as no one is, unlike Jesus, we cannot make that leap. What makes Jesus unique, and like his Father, is precisely that he offers himself for the corrupt, the thoroughly wicked, for us, once, because his gift of himself endures eternally. Made pure, washed clean of all sin, the believer is now rendered wholly acceptable to God, something none of us could ever achieve without the sacrifice of Christ. We, his new creation, are to be sharers by his gift in divine life. It is the knowledge of this wholly new status which frees us from endless nit-picking about our impoverished state, for we are now those set free (not to sin or do what we want) but to life ‘In’ and for Christ.
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