A Reflection by Frances Flatman on the Readings for next Sunday which is the 4th Sunday of Easter.
In this Fourth week of Eastertide we are exploring more and more deeply what it means to be a follower of Jesus through three different Readings from the Early Church. Our time span will run from the first Pentecost of the resurrection, 40 days after Jesus rose from the dead, through John’s Gospel, written in the 80’s CE in Ephesus (western Turkey) and finally ends up in Bithynia on the shore of the Black Sea around the very early second century, so that we can appreciate a broad stretch in time and space from the first Jerusalem experience. All these very different followers of the risen Jesus had to make some attempt to understand what was so significant about Jesus that they would be prepared to move from their traditional beliefs, be they Jewish or pagan, to worship him as their Saviour and Redeemer; and the only one in whom they could be promised eternal life. Moreover, they did not simply move from one god to another, as pagans might, but were prepared to accept the consequences of this shift, which as we shall see was increasingly becoming seen as a threat to the Roman Empire which might deal very harshly with them either by violence, such as Paul suffered locally in Ephesus from purveyors of statues of Artemis, or even the death penalty as happened to both Peter and Paul in 63 in Rome, and also happened in Bithynia. Lest we think this does not relate to modern Christians, we might think of the recent spate of Nigerian martyrs and who knows what the situation might be for all of us in the future?
We begin with our Reading from Acts (2:14.36-41) in Jerusalem for Pentecost, the great Jewish feast of the first grain harvest of the year. Our scene takes place immediately after the well-known one of the coming of the Spirit with the disciples’ ability to communicate in whatever language the pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean and the Middle East would have spoken. At this point faith in Jesus was rooted in Judaism, and yet Peter speaks of the shattering difference: Jesus ‘Whom you crucified both, Lord and Christ’. So Jesus is the long awaited Messiah (Christ) but decidedly not the great warrior hero with an army to sweep the hated Romans into the sea. Indeed, the whole promise of Jesus in offering ‘eternal life’ was never about the continuity and power of Judaism seen in the state and its continual generation, but in a very different understanding of God. Living eternally ‘in’ Christ means living the kind of life he lived on earth, and they would have known that meant continual harassment from Pharisees and finally his cruel death. It meant not gains in status which all looked for, but the putting of others before oneself. When Luke’s Peter speaks of ‘baptism for the forgiveness of your sins’, I suspect that rather than thinking of things as we do through a Confessional practice, he was thinking of this life-shift, one continually illustrated in the daily life of Jesus who confronted the law-righteousness of the Pharisees, which excluded so many from temple worship and who understood faith in terms of scrupulous following of lists of rules on what you could eat; what made you clean or unclean such as avoiding any contact with the dead, animals or even illness, typically a sign of sin. The fact that Luke reports on the considerable number who were baptised into Christ is surely an indication of the popularity and relief given to so many who experienced the Good News. We might ask ourselves what we have made of our faith today; does it reach out to outcasts or is it for the squeaky clean only?
John (10:1-10) comes from Ephesus some fifty years after the resurrection, and was written for a church of converts from paganism. When the great Jewish Revolt against Rome began from 66-70 CE, Christians split from Judaism and did not fight; the faith was already increasingly about converts from paganism. Ephesus, a prosperous sea port and imperial capital of Asia (a province in Western Turkey) full of pagan religions and philosophies shows precisely how John reaches out to converts. His will be a very different Gospel from that of the three synoptics, with his majestic Jesus; and whose great chunks of teaching, notably his great ‘I Am’ statements in which Jesus claims the divine name for God fully displaying his identity, is so different from his much earlier self-identification as ‘Son of man’. We have a great selection of them, all showing the nature and identity of Jesus: I Am the bread of Life; The True vine; Light of the world; and notable here ‘The Gate or door of the Sheepfold’, and ‘The Good Shepherd’. All of these self-identifications in fact show us a Jesus who is consistently about caring for others, one who pours himself out for his followers, just as we see he does in so many miracles, or signs as John has them. He is about LIFE in all its fullness.,
In our passage on the sheepfold, he goes to great lengths to speak of the intense relationship between himself and the sheep – clearly the Christian community- and castigates those who abuse this within the community as thieves and robbers, usually those who met a bad end under Rome. The distinction between true followers and thieves and exploiters of the faith are clear, they come merely to ‘steal, destroy and kill’; and it would appear that there were indeed those in Ephesus who did precisely this. We have to remember that this was a city with many gods and many faiths competing for attention. and the philosophers who lived there would have wanted to denigrate the faith whenever they could. So Jesus’ I Am statements are directed both as teaching to the community, and as warnings to those who would infiltrate and cause harm. Ephesus was a wealthy city and ideas of Christian sharing and the care of weaker members would have been anathema to them. Once, staying on Crete, we walked to ancient ruins every evening and were thrilled to meet a shepherd calling his sheep in to go to a secure place every night. They really did ‘know his voice’ and could distinguish it from false shepherds. Knowing whose we are and living by his tenets is the marker of the true believer and standing up for his truth is absolutely necessary for our survival.
Our final Reading (1 Peter 2:20-25) and the latest of our texts comes from Bithynia C 110 CE. Last week I spoke of Pliny the Governor’s letters about Christians to Trajan his Emperor. In these letters we see that Christians were being persecuted for their faith which was apparently disrupting pagan life in the cities, towns and even the countryside. Clearly the heirs of the apostles had done quite a job! The Letters speak of the arrest and torture of two women slave deacons. Citizens were exempt from torture. So we get a picture of the range of members of these Christian communities, and Pliny clearly finds them profoundly troubling and disturbing of the peace as trade in idols and sacrificed meat dropped alarmingly. Governors were always concerned about riots and revolt, so he needed to act. One questions just how often Christians today in the rich West would be prepared to risk such opprobrium. Oh that we would stand up for the faith and make it count!
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