Here is Frances Flatman's Reflection on next weekend's Bible Readings :-
I think we are asked to explore precisely why in today’s Readings Jesus was so radical and extraordinary in his teaching and actions, and why this scandalised Judaism. Every human being is profoundly shaped by their environment and the times they live, in albeit some of those elements will have eternal significance. Jesus’ understanding of what God the Father wished for his creation and how this radically differed from Jewish ideas about a God who was always ‘other’ than his creation, is what made him so different; and as we know, the meaning of the incarnation was his intention to make us godlike too.
Our story of Elisha and the woman of Shunem, deep in the Valley of Jezreel, (2 Kings 4:8-11.14-16) takes us back into traditional Jewish society and belief. We have seen the prophet performing traditional healing miracles and now inspired to reward the woman’s kindness by the gift of a son and heir. She was barren, the sign of failure in Israel, and when her husband died they would have no one to give continuity and story to their lives. This of course was a time long before any notion of our resurrection to eternal life, so the couple face oblivion. What was important was breeding and carrying on the family line, with its possession of lands and power which gave people some kind of immortality.
But Jesus, who knew his prophets and their social concern, was well aware of the appalling fragility of human life in the time he lived. Death rates were enormously high; funerals would have been an everyday occurrence in every village and town; child mortality as was that of mothers giving birth was astronomically high, probably only about a quarter of infants surviving to their fifth birthdays. Frequent divorce,, where the children went with their father, meant most never grew up with their ‘real’ families and would come into unions of collections of other children, and most were lucky if they ever had any grandparents. Most areas frequently suffered famines, even in cities like Rome; and wars and natural disasters could wipe out more. Whole areas could be devastated by outbreaks of the plague, as occurred in the second century when Marcus Aurelius’ armies returned from the east spreading the infection all over the Empire. The slavery system too parted families who were rarely sold off as families and the great majority of all people would die by the age of 45 years. Our modern ideas of ‘families’ of two parents and about two children living secure lives into old age are entirely unrepresentative of the ancient world and indeed of much of the Third World today. Jesus’ understanding of the Kingdom, and of Christian community, reflects this understanding of life and his determination to create new communities, new Christian families, living in solidarity and stretching way beyond the narrow limits of our Western notions of what family and community are about. He grasped the notion of what in Catholic theology we call ‘The Common Good’, not as any afterthought in our relationship with God but as absolutely fundamental to the Christian life in which we are all ‘baptised into Christ and thereby form a new community, one committed to concern and solidarity with everyone else in the community quite irrespective of race, age, gender or class; and of course in every Eucharist we join together to celebrate being ‘in Christ’, members of his body the Church, sharing the one loaf and the one cup which is the very stuff of his entire being.
It is with this in mind that we read todays Gospel (Matthew 10:37-42) with it’s to us outrageous demand that we ignore family ties. His teaching here is all about our unity; how we are made one after the pattern of the Trinity by the sacrifice Jesus made for the world; how we are now ‘sons in the Son’ destined as we live this mission out in our daily life and losing their lives for Christ’s sake by the clear sightedness of our outreach to others; welcoming others as one would Christ himself and even in the smallest gesture such as giving a drink of water to a stranger. What this does of course is to detach us from the narrow sense of possession which clings so insistently about our understanding of the modern or ancient family, with its sense of ‘mine. There, our children are valued above those of strangers and get the lion’s share of wealth, education, and the nice things of life which so work as to distinguish rich from poor. It wasn’t that Jesus disliked families or parents and children, it was simply that he had a different agenda.
St Paul, the earliest spokesman for Christ, had grasped this fundamental difference and the price which would be exacted as we live it out. Here, in Romans (6:3-4. 8-11), writing to Christians in Rome both Jew and pagan converts, he spells out the meaning of their baptism into Christ. Sadly, most today think of this ceremony as some kind of naming ritual, totally devoid of any sense of what the baby or adult is being incorporated into. Paul however lays heavy emphasis on the rite, because of its capacity to incorporate us into the death of Jesus. Sure, none of us actually redeems the world by our death, unlike that original and final sacrifice of Jesus, yet in taking us into his life we are each individually taken into the corporate life by which his death made the church, the community made in his image, and now capable and called to live with his grace and compassion for all our brothers and sisters.
Now we are no longer individuals, but members of Christ, limbs of his body, sharers in his mindset, and now no longer committed to the world as it is with all its greed and selfishness - what Paul calls ‘sin’; but freed to be what Jesus was, the face of the Father, made visible on earth, with all the grace and generosity that is his, so that we practise here and now to be godlike. This is why Paul writes with such power and intensity of our dying to sin and bringing in the new life of the resurrection. ‘When he died, he died, once for all to sin, so his life is now life with God; and in that way, you too must consider yourselves to be dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus.’ Of course, Paul was thinking that Jesus’ entire life was a dying to self, just as much as was the cross, and he understood that the believer, the baptised Christian lived as icons - true images - of Jesus, which was why he frequently went into paroxysms against the dreadful behaviour of Roman and Corinthian Christians. Sin for him was not simply infringing the rules against fornication or class consciousness or greed; it was about a fundamental failure to appreciate how such actions rejected the life of Christ we are all called to embody every moment of every day in our baptised lives. Baptism therefore is not some magic which ‘makes’ the Christian, it is the gateway to Christian life committed into the life of Jesus, images of his very being. Sure, all will fail at some point, but we have to carry Christ’s vision with us on a daily basis, lest we lose the whole meaning of his life and death which is always his invitation to be godlike, and has very little to do with morals. Remember that cup of water, tiny acts redeem the world.
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