Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings :-
Saint Augustine once pointed out that thinking that past times, and situations in the past, were ‘better’ than the present and longing for them was a waste of time and an illusion. We are all called by Christ to live in the present, and bring his love and grace to the situations in which we live. There simply were no ‘golden ages’, as any serious study of history shows us, We can only hope to have played our part in the present time.
The writer Habakkuk (here a dreadful cut and paste version (1:2-3;2:2-4) was writing as Assyrian power declined in the 7thC BCE, and that of the Babylonians gradually took over as the super-power in the ancient Middle East. His work, here omitted, is an appalling picture of the mounted armies of Babylon and the destruction they would bring with them. Eventually, as we know, this would reach Jerusalem and destroy the Temple; so a picture something like the devastation of the Ukraine today. But the writer really puts the blame for all this terror on Israel itself, divine punishment for their apostasy. This was the way in which people thought about the origin of events in those days. Significantly he writes ‘This vision is for its own time only’. Clearly, for him, there were not comparisons to be made from past events.
Yet by the time of the writing of ‘Timothy’ (2 Tim 1:6-8.13-14) we can see quite a development in thought. Clearly this letter is not Pauline, since Paul died in 63/64 CE under Nero, and this speaks to a much more developed Christian community. Here Timothy is reminded that he came to belief in Christ through his grandmother Lois and mother Eunice (1:5) and the writer, the pseudonymous Paul, is speaking to a very different situation than that in Paul’s churches, and dealing with serious disputes within the community. What he calls for is an awareness of the gifts already given to each Christian, but here clearly referring to some form of ordination into the presbyterate. ’Fan into flame the gift that God gave you when I laid my hands on you.’ He urges the church in Ephesus to keep to the traditional doctrines and ways of behaving they have received from himself – clearly in the Pauline tradition at what may have been a time of threat and when change and different variations of the Christian faith may have been threatening the community. Indeed different parts of the letter suggest considerable division and strife within this community, and knowing how to remain faithful under such stress in a volatile city like Ephesus may have been very difficult. Knowing whose we are and what we are at all times is vital, never more so in times of great strife.
As Jesus and his disciples got ever closer to Jerusalem and his passion in Luke’s account of Jesus, we see the apostles being prepared for the crisis to come. (Luke 17:5-10). As we have come to expect by now, Jesus does this not by solemn teaching, but within the context of a typically Lucan zany story which would have been appealing and memorable precisely because it spoke to the world so well known to so many: the relationship of masters to slaves. It all arose as the apostles – here seemingly in a panic - demand certainty and assurance from Jesus, and he reassures them within the teaching he has already given them. But, as we can see, not without some exasperation, ‘Were your faith the size of a mustard seed you could say…..’ and Jesus proceeds to give a crazy vision of the uprooting of a mulberry tree and its replanting in the sea, clearly not the place for their cultivation, to make the point about their already received faith in him! And of course the point is that their time with him from the earliest days of his ministry in Galilee, that up country and subversive district far from Jerusalem and deliberately chosen for his ministry, was precisely the place of Jesus’ challenge to the contemporary Judaism he opposed so consistently. In other words, the disciples and apostles ALREADY KNOW what faith in Jesus is about and how to spread the Good News, there is not some formula to be discovered either from the past or awaiting the future.
Jesus then illustrates this by reminding his hearers of what the master-slave relationship is. It’s one where the master calls all the shots and where the slave, the property of the master just like his land, his plough oxen and his barns, are all alike the chattels of the owner. Therefore, having finished ploughing or shepherding the sheep, the slaves returning home in the evening, would expect to turn to and prepare the master’s meal and only subsequently eat their own. Any fantasy that the master would have been waiting for them and invited them to recline and eat, served by the master was simply ridiculous! Of course, everyone in this society knew this was the way things were, and no one seriously thought otherwise. Indeed, Christians did not ever suggest any revolutionary ideas about the abolition of slavery until modern times. Jesus was making the point that this understanding of how society ‘ticked’ was well established, and everyone knew where they were, and that it was precisely the same with his teaching. Anyone who had spent time with Jesus would have been quite certain of his self-understanding as Son of the Father, of his challenge to the Judaism of his day, and of his certainty that he was the one to redeem or take Israel on its new trajectory as the People of God; and that this would be achieved by his titanic clash with those in power in Judaism which would result in his crucifixion, and be vindicated by his resurrection. His disciples experienced this all ‘on the hoof’, in real time, whereas we do so by reading and internalising the Gospel accounts. Yet however we come to ‘know’ Jesus, it’s the same Jesus as the one who walked in Galilee and died on the cross, there are no alternatives on offer. The point being made then by Luke’s Jesus is that the established way in which the world worked, with masters being in control of their slaves, stands as a metaphor for his relationship with his Church, however uncomfortable we may find it; precisely because it was as fixed as the image of slavery in everyday society. Jesus was saying, ‘When you are anxious and uncertain, just reflect of the way the Roman Empire is run and then remind yourself that my life’s example is as solid as that, you can rely on me, and my message does not change, it remains fixed, just like the Roman view of the world’. For us then the lesson is that we live our lives with what we have of Jesus, and we can be certain that it is trustworthy. Whilst the ‘scenery’ has changed, the message of Jesus remains.
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