Jesus reaches out to all men & women

Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings (21C)

When Biblical people, prophets or others, spoke of hope and joy, they were not in general thinking of something in the far distant future; after all, for the Old Testament writers there was no such thing as post mortem resurrection, and even when this understanding was taken up by the 2nd century BCE, it was all about hope for Israel – as a powerful and conquering nation taking control, not about individual belief which was developed by Christians through their relationship with Christ. Prophets and other forecasters of the day were a bit more like our newsmen, commentators on current situations.

Isaiah (66:18-21), and part of 3rd Isaiah prophet of the return from exile in the 6th Century BCE, was one such. He inherited a tradition of commentary stretching back into the 8th century with the Assyrian conquest of vast swathes of territory from the Fertile Crescent down into Egypt and right up into Greece and Turkey. Assyrians, a warrior group, seized Samaria, Israel’s Northern kingdom along with a host of other territories and packed the captured off to different parts of their Empire to work for them. Sensible Phoenicians in Tyre at this point had seen the light, and hopped into their boats and traded further afield from Carthage and the Western Mediterranean, including Spain. Earlier Isaiahs had commented on these deportations. So when the persecutors eventually fell to other big boys on the block, notably the Persians in the 6th century, whose policy was to return the offspring of earlier exiles home, expecting compliance and gratitude from this policy, 3rd Isaiah enthusiastically recorded his expectations about those who returned – via their offspring - to Israel and the work they had done converting others to Judaism from Tarshish, Spain; from Javan, the Greek Ionian islands and from Tubal, ancient Greek settlements on the Black Sea; and from Put and Lud, down the Nile in Sudan and southern Egypt. Other places we can’t identify doubtless came from different parts of the huge Assyrian and Babylonian empires, now in Persian hands. Clearly the word got out, and there was great rejoicing at this turn of events which was understood as the work of God.

Being people of the here and now, and those therefore who understood world events as the work of God, these writers saw adversity and good times in terms of divine punishment for offences or reward for good. Indeed, even by the time of the writer of Hebrews, Jewish Christians in Rome (12:5-7,11-13) most likely around 70-80 CE, we see that the writer was thinking in this way; God resembles earthly fathers and trains them by the rod, a way of thinking which still has remarkable currency in our own day for many, even if we have to ask ourselves if this is appropriate language for us to apply to the God of Jesus Christ.

I suggest therefore that this is what the Gospel Passage of Luke (13:22-30) is exploring. My Tutor in New Testament always made us look at the context of any passage we were studying, for it is within that setting that we get clues as to what the Reading is all about, and can be wildly lead astray if we read it out of context; and today’s section is I think one such. This part of Luke’s Gospel shows us Jesus teasing out what it means to belong to the Kingdom of God. Judaism in his day had become as we know very rule-bound, and Jesus’ three meals with Pharisees and many other incidents warn us against this attitude – not the least his healing of the sick (sinners). We must remember that (from 9:51) Jesus has been making his way to Jerusalem and his passion, so getting things sorted out would have been a priority for him. The question therefore about who would ‘get into the Kingdom and who be left outside’ is critical for Jesus’ understanding of the divine and of our future in God. Luke’s Gospel has lots of ‘housemasters’, and all of them serve the writer’s purpose of exploring the human/divine relationship so important for this work and for his patron who would have qualified for the term oikodespotes. As the householder, the oikodespotes has now shut the door, excluding late arrivals or the uninvited from his feast, it looks on the face of things as if the message here is a straightforwardly moral one. Yet knowing Jesus, and of course Luke writing for his patron, I cannot accept that this was the case; indeed, as this section continues we see an altogether more complicated picture, and no doubt we should take to heart the implications of ‘And you yourselves turned outside, and men from east and west, from north and south, will come to take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God’. It’s the excluded, the iffy and the immoral, who we so often see coming to Jesus and being accepted. Luke, famously of course, has the Good Thief saved at the last minute of his life. And in this Gospel, Jesus famously praises the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan leper who, healed by Jesus, returned to give thanks in contrast to the nine Jews who did not. Samaritans were despised by Judaism since their faith had become a mixture of Judaism and Canaanite religion. Jesus, as we have recognised in this Gospel, reaches out to all manner of men and women in this account of his life by Luke. Theophilus and his crowd would have been seen by Jews as part of an oppressor system, administering Roman law to Jewish detriment; and yet Luke’s mission was steadfastly to reach out to these conquerors in the savage aftermath of the failed Jewish Revolt. The story of the redemption of a sinful creation, brought about not by any good actions on our part but entirely the work of Jesus who fulfils to perfection the will of the Father, and opens for us the way to divine life, is and must be one of hope and joy for us all, only when we recognise that we haven’t got a leg to stand on, will we truly appreciate the extent of divine mercy and come to know that joy in its fullness.