Teaching by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings :
Learning to become a Christian, a member of and ‘in’ Christ, is a lifelong work for most of us. Admittedly there are a few courageous souls who seem to have the capacity to live this out in a fuller way; Pacifists during times of war, and those who reject the idea of the use by governments of nuclear weapons, and even those who choose a radically different lifestyle, abandoning the consumerism to which the majority of us are addicted. Many of us can’t quite get there though, and will support forms of violent resistance to evil governments such as the Apartheid regime in S Africa, or supporting the international fight against the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Clearly these battles for integrity and wholehearted devotion to the Lord have a very long history and most of us still have a very long way to go.
Zechariah (9:9-10) was a prophet of the late 6th century BCE during the time when his nation, captives of the Babylonians and then their conquerors the Persians, were returning from exile and faced the fraught conditions of a changed Israel as their lands had been settled by other nations, just as they had been sent to different parts of the Babylonian Empire. Yet Zechariah understood this period as a God-given opportunity for his people finally to live with the grace and freedom of those who truly appreciated their relationship with the God of Israel. Rather than seeing his nation as armed to the teeth against local enemies, local kings in bits of Syria and the Lebanon, he prophesied a time of living under the rule of God, in peace and harmony. So his King/Messiah does not enter on a war horse with massed troops but, ‘Victorious, he is triumphant, humble and riding on a donkey. He will banish chariots from Ephraim….’ Lord of the whole earth, he will bring peace to the entire earth. It would be a vision much sought after but rarely fulfilled in the life of turbulent Israel, or indeed any other nation, yet the very fact that this prophetic work has been retained down through the centuries still points to the hope and longing of Israel, and small wonder that the phrase is caught up by both Matthew and John in Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.
Yet St Paul, writing to the Roman Christians (Rom 8:9.11-13), and indeed to others in different cities of the Empire who would receive copies of his Letters, spoke of the necessity for an entirely different mindset from the one prevailing throughout this vast territory. Romans is his latest letter, and in it he waxes eloquent on the necessity for a real and lasting change in Christian attitudes and behaviour. In what we have as chapter 7 of Romans, he laid out the problem, one thoroughly familiar to us today, that on our own we can reason the right way to live and behave yet entirely fail to follow our own reasoning, subject as we all are to desires and false ideas which lead us astray. This stretched from ways of personal behaviour, such as the abuse of slaves in the household, to ideas of revenge against those perceived as enemies both personally or on a national or international scale; and he laments the impossibility of our ever achieving the ways of living so fundamental to the following of Christ and the Kingdom of God, unless we are consumed by the ‘Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’. Last week we explored how this was a lifelong project, and through our baptisms into Christ becomes a real possibility as we take on this new life. Clearly Paul realised this was a daily and even hourly struggle for the believer, as each sought to live by the Spirit and put aside the ‘unspiritual lives’ which so blight our entire understanding.
All of this makes sense when we look at our Gospel Reading (Matthew 11:25-30) in which he claims, following the teaching of Jesus, that the truth of the Gospel is really given to the underdogs, the children and the poor and downtrodden, those lacking status and class. We have to remind ourselves just what a status ridden society the Roman Empire was, as it stretched from Britain to the Persian border and from Germany to the Sahara, where literally everyone was hoping and finding ways to improve their social class and status and power. So slaves longed for freedom and being set up in some business enterprise by masters become patrons. Those in the army, who often began poor, could with luck rise through the ranks to become experienced centurions with better pay and real status and higher up Equestrians, gaining more land could enter the Senate and become powerful in the State. The Patrician class clung onto their ultimate status where their very dress, speech, manner of walking and their entourages of followers – those lower down - proclaimed their power from dawn to dusk, as they led their highly visible lives, even having the doors of their palaces open to the gaze of others, adverts to their rank and clout. As I hope everyone is familiar by now, through Matthew’s Gospel, with Jesus lifestyle and behaviour it is abundantly clear that he did not live like this. In a career amongst social outcasts from appalling Galilee, with its loose grasp of Jewish law, and his healing of those cut off from the respectable by illness, social pollution and outright immoral behaviour such as prostitution and tax collaboration with the Roman enemy, Jesus was hopelessly compromised. His meetings with the ‘respectable’ scribes and Pharisees always without fail fell flat, as he criticised them and their understanding of God. His Parables unfailingly criticised the rich and powerful, so that leaders of the Jewish communities always got a bad press with Jesus. Jesus unflinchingly turned to the no-bodies of his land - children, those of no status who might even be thrown on rubbish heaps by a father who did not want them, or the illiterate and the ‘overburdened’, those habitually on the breadline. Those in short he loved, entertained and cherished, and taught that there was a place in the Kingdom of God where their horrible lives could find a home. These were the ones he healed, the ones he laughed with, and those he and the disciples fed. We have to ask ourselves where we are in this picture, those of us with homes that we own, bank balances hoarded against misfortune and sickness, and ask ourselves if indeed the life of the Spirit is for us. This is not to say that we wealthy do not have our own problems of illness, and disasters, some of which will shatter our cosy lives, yet we perhaps have to learn to live with that fragility which haunts the truly poor and flung them on the love of God which many of us really think we can get by without. In the end, it’s about recognising our absolute dependence upon God whatever our status, and learning the humility to reach out to the God we meet in Jesus, who has shown us the nature of the Father and desires nothing more than that we reach out to Him as he has to us.
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