Frances Flatman writes on next Sunday's Bible Readings :-
Isn't it wonderful that God’s ways are not ours? All today’s Readings seem to take us into relationships with the divine which run quite contrary to what human behaviour would be like. We are so frequently cruel and judgemental to our fellow human beings, unwilling to give others the leeway we would expect for ourselves, and dismissive of those whose ways of acting are different from our own. God, it appears, and thank God for it because we can be so unpromising, chooses to adopt a quite different attitude towards his creation.
We meet this first in Exodus (32:7-11.13-14), our Old Testament passage. Here picturing a discussion between God and Moses and reflecting the patriarch’s exasperation with his people. He just feels like throwing in the towel and all this is expressed as the desire of God. But, after a cooling off and time for reflection, Moses recognises that such intemperance is surely unworthy of the God Israel had come to know over the centuries in its forefathers. God would hardly go to such trouble or plan something which would end in annihilation of his ‘chosen’. Through this Moses comes to appreciate, if only slowly and in fragments, the total otherness of God and his omnipotence, which results in his grace and mercy towards the waywardness of his creation. We may continually try the patience of the divine but wiping us out is never his plan; he is Lord of hope and ingenuity and always reaches out to his people giving us new possibilities to get to know him.
In the first Letter to Timothy (1:12-17) we meet a similar situation. Paul, or possibly a later writer borrowing his name, is writing to Timothy in Ephesus where it appears other church workers have been side tracked from the Gospel into more Jewish ways, tracing genealogies and myths and matters of Jewish law which have nothing to do with the Christian message. Paul deals with this situation with grace and humanity, reflecting on his own earlier life as a persecutor of the faith when he did all he could to ‘discredit the faith’, or bring about hubris in Greek. He puts his conversion to the truth entirely down to what the Greek describes as the ‘superabundant grace of our Lord’ who clearly never gives up regardless of the mis-footedness of his workers. Surely this gives a great insight for us as we reflect on the appalling mismanagement of Christian affairs over the centuries, what with the Crusades, clerical corruption and the downright stupidity of humanity.
Much the same sort of picture emerges in Luke (15:1-32), as Jesus continues teaching in parables to his followers in response to the criticisms of the Pharisees, who increasingly saw him as wildly subversive, a law-breaker, and someone who threatened their law-righteous approach to God in which only the upright (themselves) could be acceptable to the divine, despite the teaching of the Torah which continually spoke of God’s mercy. Significantly, so much of this reading is expressed in the Past Perfect tense, thereby heightening the sense of the abundance of God’s gift of himself to humanity, in vivid contrast to the behaviour of the Jewish elite who are by now intent on the destruction of Jesus. The Passion begins only four chapters later, and of course in the Greek there are no chapters, so everything runs together in rapid sequence. Jesus tells three parables which totally subvert the right and proper order of things. In the first, with the runaway sheep, which on capture should have been beaten and driven back to the flock, probably whilst being savaged by the sheepdog, we find to the contrary that the shepherd lifts the exhausted animal on his shoulders (one of the earliest images of Christ) and carries it back to the flock rejoicing. In the second, the poor woman with the lost denarius searches for it and on its rediscovery, euphoric as it meant so much to her, she equally subversively throws a party rather than squirrelling it away in her tiny hoard. In both examples Jesus speaks of this as a representation of sinners returning to the fold, clearly something Pharisees could not accept.
And then of course we have the Prodigal Son. This was a world in which fathers could legally kill miscreant sons, and so one who had treated his father as already dead and had demanded his inheritance before time should have at very least been chucked out and disowned. But no, the father complies! Guilty again. One feels the early Fathers would have had a field day here comparing the two sons and the father, Christ and the Church and their relations with Jews. So off trots our defiant son and promptly blows the inheritance on wine, women and song, clearly fornicating to his heart’s content. A famine comes along and he’s broke, so horror of horrors he ends up working for a pagan herding his pigs, an abomination to Jews, until he recognises that his plight is hopeless and decides to return home, hoping to be taken in as a servant. Here of course, for the Law-observant, matters just get worse, as the father (God-like) has been looking out for his deviant son and, abandoning the law, runs to greet him and enfold him once more into the family. Clearly, right thinking Pharisees were by now thinking the father should have been locked up! But it just got worse, for the father kisses the son, a sign of acceptance, reclothes him and puts a gold ring on his finger, so reinstating him into his class, and the household ‘celebrates’ - in Greek acts with euphoria, God-like.
Now things change as the older son enters the scene, he’s the one representing the law and what should have taken place, and we can only imagine his fury at this colossal breach in etiquette and legal requirements. The father (God-like) remonstrates, explaining his reasoning and his act of mercy which utterly outweighs any law, pointing out that all he has now belongs to the elder son (Israel) but all to no avail. The father (God) points out that familial relations count for far more than law and the possession of property, and that the return of the repentant miscreant is surely worth far more than law-uprightness, as in it the family discover the love and mercy of God and the creator’s outreach to the world. But as we end on a cliff-hanger here, I suspect that the longed for happy outcome is not to be. Jesus by this time would have known that the Pharisees would never accept his God-given outreach to the world, in which sinners are the one’s uppermost in his heart, and where the despised and excluded were always to find a place, whilst the self-serving and self-righteous were the ones to be rejected. It’s a parable of the Kingdom which bodes very badly for Israel, as we know the outcome was their rejection of the Messiah whose death they would procure, whilst their rejection meant their parting company with Christianity. Our Prodigal prefigures the tragic separation of Christianity from Judaism in the aftermath of the Jewish Revolt. We may view this as a lovely, even sentimental story of compassion, but behind it stands the terrible story of the parting of the ways in this ancient faith, and it speaks to us of the way in which Christianity would reach out to pagans and a wholly different life. It carries a serious warning to all of us about how we deal with others, the unfamiliar and even unacceptable, and where we put our own salvation at risk.
Comments