Teaching by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings :-
In one of the Monty Python films the children in a school pray to a god who is ‘Oh, you are so big!’. My guess is that believers in the incarnation transfer our understanding of the earthly life of Christ to that of God, which is not the same thing at all, but in essence God is totally other, something we explored last week with the 10,000 talents. Today we are delving deeper and, as we shall discover, what we thought and were even taught about our Bible is not fundamentally about morality, which God entirely surpasses, but about a wholly different way of our being as we live daily in the divine presence.
Second Isaiah (55:6-9), Prophet of the Babylonian Exile from 587 BCE, saw his duty lay in helping his people understand the meaning of the exile and live as God’s chosen at a time when their Temple had been destroyed, so that no sacrificial system of worship was possible,, and they were far from home in Mesopotamia surrounded by pagan gods. What on the surface might appear a new Jewish moral crusade, a ‘clean-up-your-act’ time, was to be a turning back to God as they rediscovered their faith in Yahweh far from the normal methods of worship, and of course the ones they had abused. Experiencing renewal and change of focus as we adapt to very different circumstances can be an enriching and life enhancing opportunity, as we live and grow to the Lord in unexpected circumstances. God’s ways of coming close to us are not the ways we would choose or even expect, but they can be times of immense growth, just as we in the UK have to recognise the decline in the numbers in the priesthood, and see the opportunities this gives; just as others in Africa and South America have done. ‘To live is to change’ as Newman remarked.
Paul had visited Philippi C 48-9 CE and wrote a series of Letters to the Christians there. What we have as (1:20-24.27) stems from a time, c.mid 52-early 54 CE when he was imprisoned in Ephesus. Colossians and Philemon also date from this time. Regrettably our Jerusalem translation presents the whole thing entirely devoid of context, so that it looks like some pious claptrap, presumably saying vaguely that this is how we should behave. Verse 20 actually reads, with the omissions retained as follows: ‘As it is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always in Christ will be honoured in my body whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ.’ Clearly here we find Paul wholly given over to Christ’s service, someone who has simply put ego and self-interest entirely aside. Stuck, chained in prison, guarded by the Praetorian guards, the elite around the Emperor (for Ephesus was an imperial capital with its praetorians ever ready) he could have been executed at any moment. He has no idea if he has any future, but resigns himself entirely to the Lord, whether by his death or his continuing life. Similarly in the last verse 27, abridged in our Reading, he calls the Philippian Christians, not to morality but to live as he does ‘in’ the image of Christ. ‘Stand firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.’ In other words, our behaviour, which is all within the community, through and through must image or be as icons of our Redeemer. Morality does not ever stand as the prime objective, or on its own, it is merely the only way we live in recognition of all God gives us, not the route to heaven.
We get some insight into this new way of life in Jesus’ parable in Matthew. (20:1-16) This follows very closely on from last week’s ‘10,000 talents’ and again explores the anarchic gift of God in what we call ‘the kingdom’. From it we are brought to recognise, somewhat to our disquiet, that life in and with the Father will most definitely NOT be like life on earth only with more of everything we long for. In the parable, our human demand for justice and fairness, which quite rightly we aspire to on earth, with proportionate pay for the amount of labour given, is brutally thrown aside. The landowner, here ‘oikodespote’, which says it all in Greek, hires day labourers for his vineyard. Harvest time was often a period for the use of casual labour, and those living on the margins were lucky to get hired. Indeed, he goes out five times during the day and hires men, each time agreeing their pay, but as the day ends he pays them off, curiously rewarding all the same amount, one denarius as agreed, to the chagrin of those who had toiled all day! Clearly this is not a parable about justice or labour relations, but about the unprecedented generosity of God who rewards us with entry into the kingdom quite regardless of how deserving or not we appear to be. We have it continually in the life of Jesus, the thief on the cross of Luke, the rescued fallen women, the foreigners healed, hated tax collectors included in the company of the disciples, and so on. Significantly, and sadly the English does not note the shift so clear in Greek at v.8, which moves from ‘oikodespote’ to ‘kurios’, ‘the Lord of the vineyard’. So this is a story of what the Kingdom of God is about, not the battle for justice on earth which we rightly engage in here and now. Immediately then, we become aware that we are no longer speaking of earthly things, but of our final destiny in God, who out of his superabundant grace simply awards us all, deserving and laggard alike, just as his good pleasure suits him. To complain that this is ‘not fair’ would be fatuous, as if we somehow expected Jesus to ‘get more’ because he endured the cross, or Paul exalted higher because of his death under Nero. Our lives surely are part of that long journey of discovery, in which we slowly and mostly unwillingly discover that entering the life of Father, Son and Spirit is going to be about the untrammelled joy and entry into grace, when all those things we cling onto and which seem so important are finally put aside, and we become what we were always meant to be – sharers in the divine life, God’s gift, freely given to all; and where the only insight we ever have on earth of this is to be found in the quirky life of Jesus, who became human for our sake.
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