Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings :
Those of us who frequent churches during Eastertide are familiar with hymns which praise God for the Resurrection, and are often triumphalistic as is proper for the season. Yet our Easter readings over the last couple of weeks inject a more sombre tone into our celebratory style. Those of us living in the secure West need to take this message to heart, as it is most certainly not an accurate picture of Christians in Nigeria or the sub-continent and elsewhere. Yet these are the places where the faith is thriving. The rather dark undertones to our Readings should help us to reflect more on the whole nature of the Christian Church, rather than simply take it as all achieved as we do, and where we so often spend our time in rather pointless theological arguments and bickerings over the ‘right’ form of the liturgy; for the message of the scriptures seems to be one where the Church grows through continual persecution and struggle, and not rigid formulae.
Paul’s First missionary journey, here remembered by Luke in Acts (14:21-27) recalls the end of this mission. Paul and his companions focussed their work in South-Central Turkey, visiting its small cities in turn. At every turn they seemed initially to be getting along rather well, both among Jews and pagans, until more hard line Jews who insisted upon circumcision and full adherence to the Jewish law turned significant groups back to their form of Judaism, and clearly prevented pagans from being fully incorporated into the new branch of Judaism in which they followed Jesus Christ. We enter their story at the point at which Paul and Barnabas had healed a cripple and were acclaimed as gods by the locals in Lystra; but the upshot of their actions was that the crowds, formerly so impressed, are turned by Jews and stone and nearly kill Paul. Yet far from fleeing the scene, the Apostles retrace their steps, and set up structures for the continuance of the churches in the very cities from which they had been ejected. They then return to Syrian Antioch ‘Where they had originally been commended to the grace of God for the work.’ Significantly in Greek, the term is not ‘commended’ but ‘handed-over’, the term used in the Passion accounts for the betrayal, trial and death of Jesus. It appears that their ‘success’ comes out of their own hardship and apparent failure and the persecution they undergo.
In our Gospel, (John 13:31-35) following on from the raising of Lazarus, and the foot washing, and Judas’ already planned plot to betray Jesus, we meet up with the scene where Jesus has announced that one of his disciples will hand-him-over to the authorities. He gives a piece of bread to Judas, identifying him as the man. It is at this moment of crisis, when we might expect contingency plans, or at very least flight, that Jesus proclaims this as his Hour, his time of glorification. Moreover Jesus makes clear, by repeating this same word five times, his absolute identification with the Father and that of the Father with him in what will happen to the Son. Within rejection and death and desertion, God the Father and God the Son achieve their glory! Jesus continues with his new ‘commandment’ to the eleven: ‘I give you a new commandment: love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another.’ In Greek the word ‘give’ is again the same for being given-over to grace for the Gospel in Acts, and that same word we have for betrayal. The disciples are given-over into love, clearly that shared by the Father and Son, and which is to be imprinted within every member of the community. We are those made-over for this way of life, a life of glory bound up in the Passion of the Christ.
Personally I find Apocalypse (21:1-5) near impossible to comprehend, and where I do it seems to express terribly blood-thirsty reprisals on unbelievers which does not seem to fit at all with the picture of Jesus we get from the Gospels. Here we are, almost at the end of this strange visionary’s findings, where John the Divine sees all earthly struggle resolved in the total annihilation of the old order and its replacement with a new creation. In this new world, if such we may call it, everything is beautiful. John compares it to a wedding, clearly a time of joy and hope in the future in any society. I think he is trying to convey something of the immensity of God’s power to not simply prevail in a world of appalling violence and misfortune, (something of our picture of Syria and the Ukraine right now) but rather of God’s capacity to make new, to literally make a new creation, and one of good and fruitfulness out of the chaos and darkness we have made. All in all then, our Readings call for us to trust in the God who created us and will sustain us – despite the mess we make of our planet. Please God this is what Easter is about.
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