Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings :- Easter 5
The disciples, like us, had to learn to appreciate what their relationship with Christ was about. They had lived with him for those vital three years of his ministry; witnessed his teaching and his miracles and still, as we know, when it came to defending him at his arrest they simply ran away. Understanding his resurrection was even more difficult, people did not come back from the dead! So, the post resurrection appearances of Jesus in the various ways they occurred were designed to help them, and us, make that journey of exploring the divine, the Son of God. Jesus began this teaching before his passion, and as we see in our Gospel, it was quite a difficult task; the disciples really found it profoundly difficult to understand. We all think we know what words like ‘union’ mean, and here in our three readings we are invited in different ways to explore that intimate relationship to which every Christian is called. It isn’t like ‘joining some club’, it isn’t even like ‘being in love’ with someone; it is about grasping hold of a much deeper sense of a totally changed nature – ours - in God through the self-gift of Jesus, and beginning to grasp how we live this out in our lives.
John’s Gospel (14:1-12) explores this, and significantly does so just as the Passion is about to begin so that we can appreciate the close tie between Jesus’ teaching about our relationship with God the Son and his death for our salvation. They are in effect all part of the same thing. In John 13 we have the Last Supper in which Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, his great sign of what God the Son is about, and he tells them that one of the sharers in the meal will betray him to the Jewish authorities. Peter too is told he will deny even knowing Jesus three times, and then immediately we go into ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled….’ All the way through our gospels we have gradually been discovering the colossal difference between Jesus and his many graces/gifts to us and the fact that there is no way at all in which we have any kind of ‘contractual relationship’ any equal relationship with God. We meet God through Jesus the human being, but he continually slips through our grasp by the power of his healing and feeding miracles and his lordship of creation. So too he is One with God the Father in that he is the only one who is able to reveal what God’s nature is like. He can do this because he and the Father share all things in common, between them there is absolute transparency of will and action. ‘No one can come to the Father except through me…..To have seen me is to have seen the Father.’ Jesus pins this down by telling the disciples that he is ‘in’ the Father and the Father ‘in’ him.
We could easily let this identification pass us by, and it is vital that we do not do so, for the New Testament will return to this identification on other occasions. Jesus is not merely ‘like’ the Father, as brothers or sisters might be alike, nor because of sharing say a common way of thinking, a delight in music or so on; he is identical in every way because of his divine nature. John’s Jesus expresses this in the great ‘I Am’ statements of Jesus, using the Hebrew term for God, and here also in that word ‘in’. Jesus, who fulfils all that the Father asks of him humanly, already shares in God’s nature perfectly, and so shows us what God is like. Moreover, and astoundingly, Jesus promises his disciples that they and we too will share in this relationship of total identification through his own death and resurrection. ‘Whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself.’ We too will become what 2 Peter 1:4 describes as ‘sharers in the divine nature’. Indeed, we are described as ‘Baptised into Christ.’ Galatians 3:27. In some way, we are grafted into Christ and now live even here and now as capable of sharing the divine nature. Perhaps that’s what the enigmatic ‘many rooms’ is all about.
Over the last weeks we have been exploring the ‘Petrine Letters’, written by a missionary probably in Rome to the churches in Bithynia who were undergoing persecution around the start of the 2nd century, some 40 years after the death of St Peter. He writes to comfort and certainly to bolster their sense of resistance, as some may have been persuaded to renounce their Christian faith during Pliny’s investigations. In consequence he, like John, speaks of their special relationship with Christ who he describes a ‘living stone’; and he insists on how close the link is between Christ and his communities of believers; they too are ‘made acceptable to God’, they like Christ are ‘living stones’ and they make a ‘spiritual house’. He is deliberately using this metaphor from building work to emphasise how lasting, how durable their work for the churches is. They, like Jesus, are not to fear persecution, even death, like him, since that rejected keystone – that which holds an entire arch in being - is what they already are in Christ. They are not to fear persecution since they are even here and now a ‘chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation.’ This language, borrowed from Judaism, has now jettisoned its Jewish linkage to take on the new international sense as faith in Jesus incorporates many different races and geographical identities and reaches out to the world. Each of those ‘builders’ will eventually die, but their legacy will endure, their witness will live on.
Finally, we see in Acts (6:1-7) how the earliest Christians still in Jerusalem and still fundamentally Jewish, set about being ‘in’ Christ with their daily care, both spiritual and practical for the community. They encounter real issues to which they have to find a solution, here over the distribution of food to their needy widows and orphans. We have to remember that women married very young to men at least twice their age so there were many widows and orphans. Jesus’ own story included two great feeding accounts along with all his other healing and caring acts, so that care for members became a central part of the structure of ancient Christian communities. The Hellenists, Greek speaking Jews, complained of neglect, and so the assembly selected seven men with Greek names to undertake this work. Clearly their organisational abilities impressed other Jews and acted as part of the Christian call to follow Jesus. It surely sends us a clear message that the churches in our day too must be places of welcome and real help to the needy. For so many of us this has been reduced to a ‘second collection’ but I wonder how much we have understood it in its wider aspects and are prepared to go that extra mile for the needy on our doorsteps or further away.
Comentarios