Teaching by Frances Flatman on the Readings for 30th July 2023
By now, as we all see, Jesus’ ministry in Galilee is in full swing, though as we have noted over the weeks by no means everyone appreciates it or understands what it is about. It might well stand as a near immortal image of the failure of everyone, Christians included, down through the ages to really get to grips with Jesus; yet what stands out in the Gospel and Romans is the quite overwhelming generosity of God, who ‘shares his glory’ with such unpromising material as ourselves, violent, abusive, greedy and arrogant as we are.
We get an insight into all this through the biographers of the Books of the Kings, here 1 Kings (3:5,7-12). The writers of this literature were ‘selective’ in the extreme in their valuations of the kings, common in their phraseology is ‘X sinned worse than all his fathers’, where history shows that some of the named and defamed were actually quite decent rulers and provided for their people. Our particular biographer was clearly a fan of David, and his immediate successor Solomon, for whom the king could do no wrong. Here he records a dream exchange between Solomon and God in which he is presented as humble, and all too aware of his own youthful insufficiencies as ruler, and asks God for wisdom in governing. Presented in this style, Solomon triumphs, and with divine support goes from strength to strength. Yet the historical record is by no means nearly so rosy; as we know the king fought many battles and abused his body on a vast scale with his enormous harem, and ultimately would leave a divided kingdom, thereafter continually separated as Judah in the south and Israel in the north. Court prophets and historians and their monarchs can and often do present a very idealised version of the truth usually to flatter the reigning monarch. One has only to look at the iconography of Ramesses 11 at Karnak with colossal claims of victories over the Hittites at Karnak. Oh my, what porkies we do tell!
Much of the time, when we think of ourselves, our ego gets in the way. Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of Heaven remains his genuine attempt to get those he was in contact with to accept an alternative view of the meaning of our creation by God seen from God’s point of view. We experience this throughout the Gospel through one who quite simply does not have an ego problem, as his reaching out to others is always about them and not himself. We meet it in his healing miracles, where God’s gift of life and grace is poured into the needy; in his teaching where he continually brings things down to the level of his hearers, often uneducated country people, and in his ever increasing clashes with the hard-line Jews with their rigid perceptions of moral probity. Matthew 13:44-52 which follows parables we have studied over the last weeks, which all illustrate the Kingdom, really focusses on the quite overwhelming generosity of God in what is sheer gift; it’s something we half-hearted souls find difficult. We are told that when Caernarvon and Howard Carter finally broke into the tomb of Tutankhamun, Carter on being asked what he could see responded, almost speechlessly with ‘wonderful things’. His joy was without parallel, a hint of how God responds towards us. Our parables today are about such moments of breathless joy as the finder of the treasure in the field and the pearl of superlative quality quite simply divest themselves of everything they own to buy the items. Surely we should see these parables as an indication of the divine kenosis, the self emptying of the Son as he becomes human to give/gift himself to his creation absolutely, without cost to us, without parallel in history. Moments to ‘stop your heart’, of overwhelming grace and joy. But we think these moments are about us. It’s by turning things round, experiencing them from the point of view of God and his kingdom and his delight (as if we could; though it’s Aquinas frequent term for the divine), that we are meant to sense the meaning of the parables - God’s delight in his creation - and the point is made very clearly in the third parable, that it’s only God who is able to choose who is fitted to share his life eternally, hence, the sorting of the fish with the discards. Jesus’ whole point here is that sadly most of us, most of the time, think we are the ones to make that kind of judgement – and it’s always about others. It was a parable he played a number of ways, as we saw last week with the wheat and the darnel. Our egoism makes us, like that of the scribes and Pharisees and those of the Temple who brought Jesus to trial, see ourselves as arbiters of the divine will. Jesus makes very clear that that is not our job, all of us must wait in expectation of the glories so unimaginably beyond us all and leave it to God.
St Paul, (Romans 8:28-30) despite the inadequacies of our Jerusalem translation, is on the same theme. Having realised long ago that there simply is no way in which human beings can find their way to God because of our failings, Paul must place all his hope and reliance on God. Our translation misses the point by claiming presumptuously that ‘God co-operates with all those who love him’, suggesting that the smart or squeaky clean can get there. But Paul writes in Greek of ‘God working in everything for good with those who love him’, not the same thing at all, as Paul makes clear, as he bewails the fact that even those of us who know the right thing to do, inexplicably and frequently do the exact opposite! He can only conclude that God has chosen some of us from the beginning, his nature is always about sharing, in this case the sharing of his life, his very divinity with us, and as a consequence, he himself ‘calls, justifies and shares his glory with those he chooses’. Later theologians would spend buckets of ink on ideas like predestination and justification, ideas which tend easily to separate the worthy from the unworthy, or sheep from goats or the good fish from the bad, but the problem is then that it all falls into the morality problem. As I write this on the feast of Mary Magdalen I am reminded that the first witness to the risen Christ was a woman with a rotten reputation. As Augustine remarked, none of us should presume that we are in line for selection for the kingdom with others as discards. God’s methods of selection seem altogether more zany and much more marvellous.
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