Reflection by Frances Flatman on this Sunday's Readings :-
Our Readings are all about faith and exploring what this means. Our Reading from Wisdom (18:6-9) comes from around 50 BCE in Egypt and is part of a long Jewish diatribe against paganism. We have to remember that in 70 BCE Pompey had invaded Palestine seizing it for Rome, even desecrating the Temple so that the writer had every reason to work his way through the Jewish foundational story, both to reassure believers and to emphasise the difference between them and pagan Roman occupiers. By this time of course Israel had had any number of pagan conquerors, including Alexander and his successors the Selucids who in the 2nd century had tried to enforce paganism, and the Romans were simply one more. Wisdom calls for solidarity with traditional Judaism.
But by roughly c 70-80 CE the writer of Hebrews (11:1-2.8-19) was addressing a Christian community in Rome, and was writing under the Flavian dynasty, most likely Domitian. Christians in Rome had already fallen foul to the persecution of Nero around 64, which saw the deaths of Peter and Paul and others; and it was well known that Domitian was increasingly paranoid and had brutally killed many even from the senatorial and equestrian class, so that the Christians may rightly have feared for their own survival. The writer works to ‘stiffen the sinews’, keep them faithful in hard times. It is clear from our passage that some, either converts from Judaism or ‘godfearers’, sympathisers with Judaism and Christianity who had become Christians, were havering. Judaism was a protected faith, due to its antiquity, and so the author writes a long passage of which our reading is a part. We see that he returns to the earliest origins of Judaism and its founder Abraham (Abram), a pagan in the beginning of this epic of salvation, whose story is focussed on his faith, his conviction that God, here distinct from the many pagan gods, was leading him and his clan to a different place and different future with this one God. Genesis recounts this story, but our author draws from it that sense of someone exploring his wholly new possibilities, driven by an understanding of which he himself is barely aware, and which grows by conviction (Faith), a faith shared equally by his wife and then his sons and the clan. Perhaps the significant line is ‘All these died in faith, before receiving any of the things that had been promised,’ indicating how their faith journey was one of corporate discovery over time rather than a blinding revelation which sorted everything out. There is then in faith that ‘not-knowing’ and that going on in trust and in hope, as the people yet to become Israel went through many trials, including famine and a long journey to Egypt and slavery and exodus, during which experiences their relationship with God grew and emerged. What Hebrews seems to be saying is that faith is not about absolute certainty, even the trust that all will be well; for the evidence of the past went in quite a different direction, through real trials and struggles, and yet that belief that they were on the right track continued. Rather as for many of us today, it is the faith of the Church through the ages which convicts us, and gives us the hope and surety we need, rather than our own spiritual or moral progress. We cannot ever prove the existence of God, or the promises of eternal life with Christ, and yet the witness of so many, including ancient and modern martyrs, is an enormously fortifying aid to us in our own weakness.
Luke’s writings are roughly contemporary with Hebrews, and here in his Gospel (Luke 12:32-48) he writes for Theophilus his patron and a very rich man, recalling statements of Jesus pertinent to believers. Our passage comes among a number of meal encounters with Pharisees, in which Jesus criticises them and last week’s Rich man. Now pagans, and by this time the majority of Christians were converts from paganism after the faith split from Judaism at the start of the Jewish Revolt, would have known that wealth, material prosperity was a pagan virtue, and not to say very useful in this world without state help for the needy. The divide between rich and poor was often immense, and the avarice and double dealing in which so many indulged was all about making your way up the greasy pole to material success. There was virtually no one who was not concerned with this need to make good at any cost, from Consular Governors who ripped off whole provinces, down to those freedmen and women who were set up in business by their former masters, now patrons, to make as much as they could. It was an aggressively money focussed society. No doubt Luke included these sayings of Jesus quite deliberately to get his patron to reconsider his lifestyle and he demonstrates a detailed knowledge of the workings of elite households, where staff anxiously await the return of a master from a night’s feasting, possibly dead drunk and needing to be cared for. But then Jesus/Luke does an extraordinary thing, instead of the master being properly taken care of at some ungodly hour of the night, he rewards the dutiful slaves, grabs an apron and rewards them by himself waiting on them!
We must recognise that this is not about real life, but a Parable of the Kingdom’, in which God/the supreme householder/oikodespotes rewards the faithful and alert, in other words those who hang on in there despite the difficulties and the struggles which life throws at them. Once a year, at Saturnalia, around late December, slaves chose one member of the house to be ‘king for the day’ and lord it over the entire house. Elite writers remark how they usually decamped for this period which was not about any equality of the classes but deliberately done to enforce the differences of status and power. Jesus/Luke reminds them of this with the witty picture of the householder well prepared for the burglar’s visit! What we are left with is a picture of Kingdom life where things will be radically different. In God’s household everyone will be equal, as all here are sinners in need of redemption, and there is no one who could pull rank. All, redeemed by the death and resurrection of Christ will be heirs, sons made for divinity. We, knowing our place, will recognise that ‘When a man has had a great deal given him on trust, even more will be expected of him.’
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