Teaching by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings :-
Despite the fact that we in the West dislike and resent the idea of suffering, as we see from all the ‘miracle cures’ offered on the Web and our over inflated expectations of modern medicine, it’s still something we, along with the Third World have to cope with, let us never forget the inevitability of ‘death and taxes’. Though for the poorer of course it’s frequently exacerbated by war and drought. So, whilst our Bible Readings might appear gloomy, they do perhaps have a lot to offer us today by ways of approaching different forms of suffering and even persecution in the cause of our faith.
Jeremiah (20:10-13) quite simply approaches the issue from a very personal perspective. Writing as one of what would be recognised as one of the major prophets of the 6th century BCE, and who were in fact commentators on the socio-political situation of their times, Jeremiah fell foul of the king and his court. They had reneged on their vassal state to the Babylonians, preferring instead to throw in their lot with the other super power of the time, Egypt; believing that in doing so they could regain independence. Jeremiah understood their present plight as due to the nation’s turning from loyalty to Yahwism to the worship of the god Baal, one of the chief of many of the pagan gods of the area. Of course, when, due to their unfortunate geographical position between the two great warring powers, they came unstuck, a terrible fate awaited the nation. Nebuchadnezzar and his troops besieged Lachish and sacked it – any trip to the British Museum is incomplete without a visit to the story of its terrible fall in the palace frieze from Nineveh! Lesser mortals can view casts of bits in the Ashmolean in Oxford. But Jeremiah found that his forthright speeches against the policy of the king and court got him into terrible trouble, and he was deserted by friend and foe and finally imprisoned in a dry cistern during the siege of Jerusalem, where he came to the conclusion that he was alone and only had God to rely on. Events in Babylon were finally to intervene, but he was to see his monarch and nation taken into captivity and exile and the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was destroyed. There can be a savage price to pay for being right ,but he defended the God of Israel.
St Paul however looks as matters in a much more forensic and theological way, as he considers why it is that things go wrong in the world. Romans (5:12-15) sees him delving into ancient Jewish thought by way of Genesis 3, with its writer’s solution to the problem of human sin and their conclusion that it is endemic due to the disobedience of Adam and Eve. Those familiar with Paul’s work will appreciate that his many letters have seen him turn from hard-line Judaism as a Pharisee to the worship of Christ; and his firm conviction that the Jewish law, by which thousands lived in faithfulness, believing it would make them ‘righteous’ in relation to God, was actually wrong. In Romans, his last letter, we find him after many battles with his former fellow believers, coming to the conclusion that obedience to the law could only play a minimal part in salvation, and that by pointing out human error. The way to truly come to God and his overwhelming love for humanity rests wholly in Christ. Here, in our Reading, he makes the point that sin, or disobedience to God, preceded the Jewish law by thousands of years, so that it could only ever have played a provisional part in salvation. Paul’s point is however much more significant, taking us back to creation where God’s plan for salvation began and would come to fruition in the gift of Christ the Son to the world; not as a ‘solution’ to a problem: ‘But the gift itself considerably outweighed the fall.’ but as a demonstration of the divine nature, one eternally of shared grace, ‘An abundant free gift’, whereby we are all invited to live with the grace and generosity of God himself, which was what Adam and Eve tragically failed to grasp. Sin and its sadness, violence and loss are never what we are created to be, and the possibility of living differently in Christ is continually held out to everyone. For Paul, human suffering and persecution, especially that for the faith, will always be about our unregenerate state and our re-making ‘in’ Christ.
Our Gospel, (Matthew 10:26-33) places us in the heartland of Jesus’ ministry, in Galilee, and he has just performed a spectacular number of healing miracles, demonstrating his intimate connection with God. But his detractors, the scribes and Pharisees, insist that he is healing by demonic power. Significantly at this point, Jesus commissions the twelve to go out in pairs with their own power to heal showing that God’s abundant grace is given to the community of believers. Yet they are only to go to Jewish towns, a sign of his desperate wish to convince the Jews of his own identity. So, he warns the twelve of the hostility their ministries will provoke and the persecution ahead of them. ‘Do not be afraid,’ Jesus says, though persecuted and disbelieved, or killed, their work, their impact, will live on in the eternal life he, Jesus will win for them. In our world we count success differently, in terms of visible triumph and the destruction of those we see as enemies in some way; but Jesus’ understanding of the Kingdom of God, unlike that of Jews of the time who were expecting a successful warrior messiah who would liberate Israel, was quite different as he promised his followers they would reign in glory with God in heaven, that our unity with the divine would ultimately be complete. ‘So if anyone declares himself for me in the presence of men, I will declare myself for him in the presence of my Father in heaven.’ Jesus was well aware of the cost of his radical understanding of his and our belief of our destiny in God which was so very different from Jewish notions of a distant God and the gaining of ‘righteousness’ through the following of rules of behaviour. Matthew describes the entire scenario in one word, ‘scandal’. Jesus’ behaviour and understanding of his relationship with the God he understood as ‘Father’, and the way he acted in relation to the poor and needy, was seen by the righteous as a scandal to the Jewish faith, and was the reason why he was persecuted and killed. What he tells his followers is that they too may well be faced with the same persecution. In the West it would appear that our times of persecution are over, but elsewhere, in Africa, Central and South America and Asia this is far from the case, where simply being a Christian can result in one’s death, or where brave members of the community stand up for the human rights of their brothers and sisters, even for non-Christians in solidarity with true humanity.
‘You are worth more than hundreds of sparrows.’ - in Greek ‘Many sparrows’. Faith in Jesus, and the radical message he preached in word and action, requires more than mere lip service, indeed, more than simply attendance at Mass, and it might well be an act of scandalous subversion and very risky!
Bình luận