Reflection by Frances Flatman :
I am presently reading Alice Roberts ‘Buried’, a fascinating work by an osteoarchaeologist, but a committed Humanist who can’t get her head round the idea that any thinking person might be so deluded as to believe in any gods or God. Whilst grudgingly accepting of ancient customs, she is quite dismissive of modern believers either in Christ, Islam or Buddhism. Her mantra is ‘Well we can’t ‘prove it’, presumably under the impression that God is some being ‘in’ our universe and therefore liable to respond to reasoned arguments or searches. But then you can’t prove that some things in this world exist either, love for instance can be a very uncertain thing, and whilst we think we ‘know’ and trust someone absolutely and commit our lives to them; we may, as some sadly discover, have been thoroughly duped. God, being creator of the universe, is not ‘One of us only greater’, he is totally other and the quite remarkable thing is that millions of Christians – and indeed others like their devout forebears placed their trust in a being like this, and were not disappointed.
Our Reading from Ecclesiastes or Qoheleth (1:2; 2:21-23) explores this issue. Written from Egypt or Israel in the early 2nd Century BCE we meet a thoroughly disillusioned man living under the rule of the Ptolemy’s. We know that at this time Israel was under Egyptian Hellenistic control, and documents show how thoroughly everything was directed so that the people beavered away, but all the profits went to their masters. He and his people were simply being thoroughly ripped off and had no promise of help over the horizon. Clearly for this writer, before there was any sense of resurrection post mortem, everything was just a colossal waste of time. Like Ms Roberts, since he could not be in control of his own life, things were pretty bleak.
How very different it was some two hundred years later, as we find in Paul’s Letter to the Christians of Colossae. (Col 3:1-5,9-11) Paul continues the teaching we received in last week’s passage, reminding them of the enormity of the sea change which has occurred in their lives, as they are already ‘co-raised with Christ’, altering their entire reality, and which so tarnished their human lives as pagans. We tend to think of Paul as a miserable old kill-joy, but anyone intimate with life in ancient times knew precisely how in-your face the tragic abuse of fellow human beings was, with the Games which cheerfully watched the ripping up of other human beings for sport, with gladiators as the main events, and then the killing of noxii – criminals including Christians - as the lunch time diversion, savaged to death by wild animals. Slavery meant that people could buy and sell other human beings with impunity and treat them as they wished. What I find significant here is that in all this Paul picks out greed or ‘covetousness’, that envy and desire which led them to treat their fellow human beings as mere commodities to be exploited. He is not calling for them to reject this human life in its entirety, but to focus now on living as the people of God with his generosity and mercy. The Jerusalem Bible has this shift in moralistic terms as ‘Progressing towards true knowledge’ whereas the Greek writes of our having ‘Put on the new nature which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.’ This surely is about God’s grace living in us, our being open to live like Christ. Paul goes on to illustrate the enormity of this change, how there is now no room for those class and status distinctions which framed society, between Jew and Greek, outsiders to the Empire, and slave and free. These were truly radical shifts in the perception one of another, and as we know to our cost distinctions which still bedevil our own society. ‘There is only Christ’. Would we could carry this motto with us every day, and the liberating grace of the Creator and Redeemer.
In our Gospel (Luke 12:13-21) we see this teaching in the work of Jesus. Now Luke knew that his patron Theophilus and his class were a group continually on the make. It was common for the wealthy to buy up large areas of Rome and other cities after major fires and rebuild cheap tenements for rent to the poor; and similarly they also built large granaries, in Rome at the base of the Aventine in the dock area, to store grain and sell it at vastly inflated prices during times of shortage or famine. The Glaba family (later producing an Emperor) had one such, the Horrea Galbana and if you have ever visited Ostia you will have noticed the elegant Horrea Epagathiana et Hilariana, looking for all the world like a Greek temple. These were men and women who grew super rich on the exploitation of others, and Jesus and Luke were at pains to get them to recognise the radical nature of the new Christian ideology of which they were a part. Jesus was very stark in his warning, as he reminded his contemporaries of the fragility of human life in a time when the bearing of corpses out of any city would have been daily events. We, they, need to remember whose we are. Living as Christians today, as it was 2,000 years ago, is no less wonderful or demanding, ‘There is only Christ, he is in everything.’ Being a believer in God is not about fanciful ideas but following Jesus, God who became human to enable us to live with the grace and generosity of God himself.
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