Teaching by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Reading :-
Isn’t it nice when everything goes well and we are led to think that we are firmly in control of events? That’s how most of us like to be, calm, comfortable, all running smoothly. Think how much we resent illness, accident or the interference and repressing of others, be that the State or other groups who cause upheaval, pain, loss and chaos. We in the First World, with economies that largely protect us from upheaval, with good living conditions, can easily learn to live in our own happy bubbles, like the man who told his priest that the family did not attend church any longer as they could simply watch it all Streamed online as they had done during Covid lockdowns! Well, it is good to have periods of solitude, but perhaps it’s what we cause the church to become during such times that may in fact become a trap, causing our faith to be ‘Conformed to this world’ rather than exploring fully what the Church Jesus brought into being was all about. Too close a tie to the state, as we find in Russia, can seriously compromise the Christian message; just as Wealth Churches in the US and great ceremonies and events which parade its power do. This is not to suggest that we should long after instability and chaos, but rather that Christians are framed by very different outlooks than those of the world which we glibly take for granted.
Indeed, the whole history of Israel, as we see from Exodus – Kings seems to be about finding God in the very vulnerability of life, and the prophets complain bitterly against times of success, prosperity and abuse of the poor as we ‘Loll on ivory beds.’ Jeremiah, prophet of the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE, was a lone figure protesting against the court and its prophets; men secure in the entourage of the kings; Yes-men to the hierarchy. His complaints about the monarch’s policies made him a marked man, persecuted and very nearly killed as Jerusalem was besieged by the Babylonians; and he was thrown down a well when he opposed those round the king who wrongly turned to Egypt for support which was never to come. The fact that Jeremiah was right, was neither adequate defence nor protection; our prophet paid a bitter price for his deep relationship with God and his dealings with the court.
What we have to remember about St Paul was that he was a renegade Jew, deeply despised and hated by his fellow Jews, especially since he had been amongst the foremost scholars and practitioners of the Jewish Law/Torah of his day. Indeed, as his Letters show, his missionary journeys for Christ were continually dogged by Jews, who insisted that the way to salvation always lay in conversion to Judaism, whereas Paul resolutely preached a gospel free of the demands of the law. In Romans (12:1-2) we catch up with him again; you will recall his terrible grief at the failure of the Jewish people to become recognisers of Christ as the long awaited Messiah, and his willingness to die to achieve this if needs be. Paul was convinced that the Jewish Law was not the way to salvation, which he had clearly come to see lay in the model of Christ’s life and death and resurrection. Fellow Jews believed that through rigorous attention to Torah one could become ‘righteous’, pleasing to God. Paul, by contrast, now conformed to the life of Christ, and not merely straightened out a bit or ‘changed’ as the Jerusalem Bible suggests, but ‘metamorphosed’ (as in the Greek) suggestive of a profound change at the level of our being (caterpillars into butterflies), has recognised that fundamentally Israel’s and our story of redemption is not about us but about God. So, ultimately our life ‘in’ God through Christ will not be about how ‘good’ or not we have been, but about grace, Christ’s gift to us by which we are made worthy of the kingdom; life in the divine being. Our moral right behaviour is simply the recognition of this gift, and NEVER its cause. Clearly, as he knew Israel’s story very well, he was in a position to make this judgement, and the Jesus Christ he knew was patently not a conformist. As we see in the Gospels, Jesus broke the Sabbath rules to heal, mixed with ‘sinners’ those who the law saw as unclean, the sick, mentally ill, prostitutes or even the dead. In fact, everything about Jesus seemed to run contrary to Jewish separatism and perfectionism, as we have seen with his healing trips to pagan Tyre and Sidon and the Decapolis. According to the law Jesus was an outrage, a scandal. But whatever it was happened to Paul after the resurrection of Jesus, clearly at some point his commitment to Jesus and his way of salvation was absolute. Paul was a doomed man, like his new master. What he speaks of then is a ‘metamorphosis’, a complete change of all that we are, as he threw aside the demands of Judaism to travel and take the message of Jesus out to the pagan Mediterranean, to people whose ways of living and believing would have been grossly offensive to Jews, and whose lives he began to transform according to the pattern of Christ. That persecution of his mission, and that of later groups was inevitable, was no bar to his mission as we see him working in leather – despised as contaminating by Jews - and frequently in trouble with the Greek municipal authorities of the cities where he based his ministry.
In our Gospel, (Matthew 16:21-27) we have just seen Jesus acclaimed as the Christ by Peter, and the Lord appears to grant him enormous authority and power, just as we acquisitive worldly folk might hope; and no doubt Peter and the rest thought so too. But immediately following, Jesus gives the first of three predictions of – not fame and glory, not the worldly messianic hope, but of his passion and death before his resurrection on the third day. A horrified Peter protests, only to be savagely put in his place by Jesus as a scandal. Security, success and fame are not his way. ’Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.’ Is this what Paul meant by ‘metamorphosis’? A huge sea-change in the personality and priorities of his followers? We in the UK rejoice that Catholics are no longer persecuted and killed, and now are seen as equals of others in the land. No longer can we be hung, drawn and quartered for the faith, and we find the very idea of giving oneself to God in this way reprehensible. But what of those in India, in Nigeria and elsewhere who are actually martyred for the faith today, those whose faith in Jesus is so overwhelming that they would die rather than renounce him? What does it mean for us to be so metamorphosed by Christ that we can somehow be different from those in our rich world? Simply living as Sunday Mass attenders was never Paul’s vision of our ‘life in Christ’, something more profound, something about the making of communities of believers whose outreach to the world has real significance was meant and fundamental. In the end I guess Christians have to embrace the very fragility of becoming human as Jesus did, and become those of staggering and reckless outreach to those in need, disregarding self in anticipation of the Kingdom.
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