Reflection by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings :-
Our western world, like peoples of the ancient past, saw success and the things to be aimed for in terms of material riches. This was why the rich donated great civic buildings to their cities and made sure their named donations were recorded for posterity. We can still today read their inscriptions on the seating of the Odeon of Pompeii, or later records in Christian Churches built due to the largess of wealthy Christians, those with power and influence who frequently became bishops! Yet the biblical view of those ‘close to God’ has always been very different. We think of the outcast Elijah, dossing down with pagan women; or indeed of 1st Isaiah who fell victim to the elite of Jerusalem for his criticisms of the powerful. Our age similarly continues to think and act in terms of cultivating the rich and powerful, and sees them as all important. Sure, we make pious statements about loving the poor and even send them handouts, but the idea that we and our church might actually become poor and needy is not something to which we take kindly. One has only to look at the appalled reaction to Pope Francis’ refusal to live in splendour in the Vatican, and his choice of a simpler life as one of many in Santa Marta, allied with the tone of his homilies, to appreciate precisely the reason for his unpopularity with some Catholics still yearning for the days of pomp and splendour. Yet Jesus’ entire earthly life was one which fostered this alternative society, as he had his mission in despised Galilee among the sick and needy, those thought ‘unclean’ by the religious elite and he continually challenged the mores of the establishment. Perhaps the reason for this lay in the fact, appreciated by St Paul and Gospel writers, was that recognising the absolute difference between God and humanity, he understood that all attempts to ‘make one’s way in society’ were to follow the ways of the world which lead nowhere; recognising the absolute power of the creator and sustainer of the universe was the way to honour and respect him, competition for power with God is the ultimate fallacy.
Yet this is such a difficult lesson to learn, way back in the 8th C BCE the Assyrian super power had conquered Samaria/Israel and Galilee and settled foreigners in the area. By the time of the reign of King Josiah, the reformer-king of Deuteronomy, their control over the area was in decline as the Babylonians rose to power. This is the settling for the work of Zephaniah (2:3; 3:12-13). The king was a reformer who attempted to restore the proper worship of Yahweh in his kingdom where it had declined due to the pagan practices of his predecessor, and no doubt the prophet saw the disturbed times as due in part to this apostasy. What he longs for throughout is the coming of the ‘Day of Yahweh’, and he understood this to be found in obedience to God, seen in uncomfortable words like ‘humility, integrity, lowliness’ and the idea that wrong doing and lying would no longer be a feature of the lives of the people. Needless to say, it all went down the pan when the king and his forces were destroyed at the battle of Carchemish, though history recorded his and his prophet’s genuine attempts at reform. So much it appears gets in the way of human attempts to live as the people of God.
Writing to his convert Christians in Corinth (1 Cor 26-31), Paul carries on from where we saw him last week with a divided church, some for ‘Paul, others for Apollos and others for Christ’. He gives them a thorough ticking-off as they compete for a place in the sun, striving as did every pagan for that leg-up which would bring them more money, greater status and influence, all the things the citizen body devoted so much time and effort to achieve. In contrast, Paul reminds them of the earthly life of Jesus, the Son of God, ‘No, it was to shame the wise that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that he chose what is weak by human reckoning;…...those whom the world thinks common and contemptible are the ones that God has chosen.’ Corinthian society was very ‘upwardly mobile’, it was a nouveau-riche world full of traders and self-made men and women, all highly competitive and continually comparing themselves with the neighbours; for fortunes were to be made in Corinth from shipping and trading in goods even as far away as India and China, and we know that it was a litigious world where legal cases frequented the courts as greedy men and women sought to come out on top. Just imagine therefore the problems Paul encountered as he attempted to teach and get his community to live out the Christian virtues modelled on the life of Jesus, and what a battle he had to insist that their only boast was to be the life of Jesus, the failure who was crucified yet rose from the dead.
About a week ago in northern Nigeria, bandits burned down a church killing one of its priests Fr Isaac and injuring another. Isaac joins the ever-increasing list of modern martyrs in this dangerous part of the world, a situation well nigh unthinkable in modern Britain, but one who would appear to fulfil the criteria of our Beatitudes, Matthew (5:1-12). Not of course the Jerusalem Bible’s clumsy ‘happy’ but the Greek ‘Blessed’ . ‘Blessed are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account….your reward will be great in heaven.’ In this Reading from Matthew, preached to the socially outcast of Galilee, we find Jesus laying out his radical, even revolutionary message, one which went totally against the grain of popular thinking, as even the very poor he spoke to would have been hoping for a way out from the besetting rural poverty, even the threats of slavery or day labouring which inevitably tied them to the land with little hope of betterment. And yet he clearly saw that theirs was not a hopeless existence, for this environment produced those who sought change; who realised that this rural underclass could have a better life freed from those who complained about the brutality of tax men and landowners. It was into this volatile world that Jesus stepped and taught, one where small groups of bandits might well rise up and terrorise the neighbourhood. And yet he spoke to them of a different vision of humanity, suggesting that rejection, violence and persecution were not the inevitable fate awaiting them, but rather lives lived with his own vision of grace and generosity were possible, communities of friends and helpers such as can still be found in Nigeria and central Africa and South America where the poor come together for self-help and despite the many serious set-backs still manage to give one another help and support. The Pope has asked that we pray for Fr Isaac and his like, for such form the kingdom of God. Would we too could be like them.
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