Reflection by Frances Flatman on the Readings for next Sunday (2nd Sunday of Lent)
Stepping out in faith, or indeed in any other conviction, that you are doing the right thing can be tricky. How do we know that we are following God’s will? By what criteria do we judge subsequent events as confirmation that we have made the right choice? Sometimes, as with science, we find ourselves at a dead end and we have to start all over again. But what do we make such assessments from? As we shall see from today’s Readings, a ‘happy outcome’ is not necessarily what following God’s way is about, yet it may well be right. The US ‘Prosperity Churches’ for all their wealth seem very far from the Jesus we meet in the Gospels. Often, we learn more about the divine from the continual mistakes we make rather than from our successes. Absolute certainty, confirmed by God, is given to few of us; and much of the time lots of us stumble along in the gloom if not the absolute dark.
Abram, a pagan of Ur in Mesopotamia (Genesis 12:1-4) stepped out with his clan, most likely provoked by overpopulation and famine, and migrated first to Haran in the north of the Fertile Crescent, then subsequently split from more of the clan in this tale of ancient origins, before he went west into Palestine. Sometime during these wanderings, he forsook his gods for the God who would become the God of Israel, and Abram’s name changed to Abraham, founding father of the nation. Considerably to my surprise, Friedman’s ‘Commentary on the Torah’ insists that Jewish scholars, far from seeing these events as making for a separatist and exclusive state, looked forward to their meetings with foreigners in Palestine very positively! Clearly things changed considerably at a later date and much for the worse. As the Genesis story continues, we see what would become Israel embark on many more journeys of discovery of the divine and the self, as they travelled to Egypt, and then even later were enslaved elsewhere. The journeys serve as periods of discovery and adjustment as they relate to God, and most of the time they take very hard knocks, growing up as the people of Israel was, and still does require, continually relearning what living as the people of God is all about.
Ephesus was one of the eastern Imperial capitals and a thriving pagan city, with philosophers, libraries and a lively port, in south-western Turkey. The centre of huge pagan cults, especially of Artemis (which Paul clashed with), Christianity found it difficult to find a foothold in the society of the time for the best part of 400 years. But as we see in the 2nd Letter to Timothy, (1:8-10) Paul had left Timothy there in charge of the extremely tiny Christian community. At the time of writing these letters, Paul was in prison (the first half of verse 8 curiously omitted from our text). Now as Paul was by then well-known from his ministry which stretched from Galatia (central Turkey) to Greece, and his letters were copied and shared between the different Christian city communities of Asia (western Turkey) where his colleagues worked, we can well imagine the shock and horror caused by his incarceration. Followers of Jesus, with a Pauline understanding of the victory of Christ over death and sin, might well have expected him to have evaded any such capture and certainly not to be languishing in prison; but Paul writes to the community insisting that this is by no means the case. ‘With me bear the hardships for the sake of the Good News, relying on the power of God who has saved us and called us to be holy.’ In Greek what we have as ‘hardships’ are called ‘temptations’, suggesting that the Christian group would be so fearful because of Paul’s arrest that they might simply throw in the towel and revert to paganism. Testing times Paul explains, following in the pattern of Christ, can be times of strengthening of the faith, as we come to understand more deeply the extent of evil in our world which needs to be combatted, as did Jesus himself and it took him to the cross. Others simply turn away, as we see in the Parable of the Sower.
There are times when we simply don’t know what to make of events, or understand God’s presence in them; one thinks of the refugees from the Ukraine, or those left from the earthquakes in Syria and Turkey. Such seems to have been the case with Peter, James and John at the Transfiguration. (Matthew 17:1-9) It’s all very well to look back and then see things positively but not so easy at the time, and the fact that the gospels report this as a moment of complete incomprehension and terror for the three is very telling. Matthew’s choice of placing this event close to Jesus’ first prediction of his Passion and death, (16:21) along with the appalling and unremitting details of his savage clashes with scribes and Pharisees who repeatedly accuse him of healing by the power of Satan and his consistent rejection of the Jewish cities of Galilee and its people as he turns more and more to pagan foreigners, presents us with a truly disquieting situation. Ancient people found encounters with the divine very disturbing, and tended to like them ‘controlled’, either by occurring in a given holy sanctuary, or a dream, or at some other remove. The actions and presence of Jesus the healer – off-piste - among the ordinary hum-drum of daily life was, we must recall, profoundly disturbing; and we can begin to appreciate a little why Matthew describes Jesus as a ‘scandal’, and uses the same verb for the effect he has on so many. The synoptics do not have Jesus going to the highly controlled Jerusalem Temple with any frequency, his ministry is up in Galilee, a place of foreign influence and corrupted Judaism. But our Transfiguration shows the reaction of the three major disciples, with Peter’s ‘Let’s make tents for you, Moses and Elijah’. He’s desperate to please, clueless, and making a gauche attempt to ‘contain’ these visitors from the dead along with Jesus! Imagine their terror then when the bright light and the divine voice demanded they ‘listen’ to the Son! Jews as we know had severe laws against communing with the dead, as did Romans, and so fortunately Jesus rescues them from this overwhelming situation with his instruction that they, ‘Tell no one about the vision until the Son of Man has risen from the dead.’ Well, I bet that made it all clear – we know from the Gospels that at the cross they had all run away. Living with the divine, albeit in human form must have been extraordinarily difficult, and surely the little glimpses of God which we too are granted can often be more muddling than the moments of great clarity and straightforwardness most of us would like. Yet we have to accept that this is God’s way; after all if it was all perfectly clear and our response guaranteed, where would our freedom of choice lie? Discerning the mystery in the midst of all the confusion and uncertainty is precisely the gift of God to us, just as it was to Jesus in Gethsemane and on the cross.
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