Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings :-
I suggest that today’s Readings help focus our minds on truly preparing for Easter and our entry into the ways of God through the sacrifice of the one truly human being, Jesus. Most of us feel very comfortable with ‘our’ way of being a Christian, and we can be critical and dismissive of other people’s attempts at being faithful. Some don’t care for Charismatics. Others think only the Latin Rite will pass muster. Whilst many of us think only our Catholic church is the one on the path to salvation. All our Readings challenge this perspective, since none of us can ever stand comparison with Jesus; and we must always aim to be open to different perspectives on the faith, which is why of course, we have four Gospels.
In Exodus (3:1-8.13-15) we meet up with Moses who had fled Egypt after murdering an Egyptian, thus breaking the Commandments, and who lives in pagan Midian and had married the daughter of a pagan priest. We can see therefore that he fails to meet the requirements of those upstanding in the Jewish faith in innumerable ways. Yet it is Moses, brought up by Egyptians who is chosen, called by God to lead the people of Israel out of slavery. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob it appears is not quite so sniffy. Moses protests when called by God, extremely uncertain of his reception by Israel, and of how to go about the task: ‘I am to go then, to the sons of Israel and say to them, “the God of your fathers has sent me to you.” And, as we know the people of Israel were most unwilling to follow the guidance of Moses on their journey to the Promised Land, and had to face continual reappraisal and transformation.
It appears that Paul had very similar problems with the tiny Christian community in Corinth which he brought into being in the early 50’s CE. This twin port and great commercial city which was made up of veterans of Julius Caesar’s army, and traders from all over the Mediterranean, had a plethora of pagan gods which could always squeeze up and make room for one more from the East, be it Isis, Cybele, Mithras and even later, Manicheans. Clearly some Christians thought belief in Christ was much the same as being a nouveau-riche place; they were highly competitive not just in financial and material matters but also in their ideas about the divine. As Athens as a great centre of philosophy declined, this great way of thinking shifted its base to Corinth too, and even affected the burgeoning Christian groups. Paul had previously complained of their divisions, some following his teaching, some that of Apollos, some Peter’s, and their actual practice varied too, some insisting that receiving the message via ‘tongues’ was the only way and disparaging others less ‘blessed’. Some thought of themselves as ‘spiritual people’, Spirit-filled, and rejected others; whilst Paul himself insists that what mattered was the cross of Christ, and we can appreciate just how difficult it would have been for believers in a Redeemer to accept the truly appalling death of Christ, and so much easier to follow some elevated doctrine about him instead; especially in this city where coming out on top was the prime objective of life. Paul reminds them of their Jewish origins, and uses the Moses-Exodus story, here seen as prefiguring Christ as the unifying element with ‘All guided by a cloud…all passed through the sea… all baptised into Moses… all ate the same spiritual food and all drank from the same spiritual drink, since they all drank from the spiritual rock that followed them.’ Getting carried away by different doctrines, or even beguiled by different rites and practices, may lead us to reject others, fellow believers, and we are called to salvation solely in Christ and we must remember that.
Luke takes up this issue through the ancient fixation which we still have that misfortune is divine punishment; something he knew was totally alien to the working of our merciful God who gave his life for all of us sinners. Divine punishment is an anathema. He enters the question through the well known Christian story of Pilate’s slaughter of Galilean Jews killed en route to sacrifice in Jerusalem, and the sacrilege he caused by mingling their blood with that of their intended temple sacrifices. We should perhaps think of his troops simply seizing the opportunity of taking the animals by force and meeting resistance with murder. Pilate was, by the time of Luke’s writing, long gone from Roman service, an exile by 36 CE, sitting it out in the flesh-pots of Marseilles, so that Luke was by no means attacking the Roman state in recalling this example of depravity in the late 70’s. What he could do however was to recall the historical event, and the further example of the collapse of the tower of Siloam which killed a number of people in Jerusalem, to enforce the need for us all to be in a state of readiness to meet Christ in our deaths at any moment, such is the precarious nature of human life, as we are seeing at present with the victims of Putin’s terror in the Ukraine. What Jesus’ final parable calls for is compassion, hopefulness and patience as the prerogative of all human beings as we go on life’s journey. Jesus, as we know, unlike us, was always willing to give others a second chance and to be broad minded in our understanding of others. Perhaps this is the message of this Sunday’s Lent Readings.
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