Here is Frances Flatman's Teaching on next weekend's Readings :-
Through his ministry Jesus worked tirelessly to get his followers to understand what God or the ‘Kingdom of God’ is like, for the two are interchangeable. God doesn’t have places or bits of himself different from his entirety, his being. Our scriptures indicate that this has been an exercise of very long duration; indeed, formed from earliest times when Israel began to enter into its relationship with the divine. Naturally enough, like any other group of human beings, they formed their ideas of God from others round about, so that we meet them sacrificing babies to the God alongside neighbouring pagans, or going to war since, ‘if God is on my side, then inevitably my nation must get bigger and more powerful and conquer the planet’. As we see in the Old Testament, this approach has invariably produced monsters of the Putin or Trump style, and to this day has turned Israel into a race determined to rid Palestine of the ancient occupiers of the land regardless of the chaos and incessant war that this produces. Jesus’ vision of the God he daringly called ‘Father’ is entirely different. When you have a being not in this universe, but the universal creator of all there is, you encounter a being of quite unprecedented power. How then is this being to exercise its power? Surely not by resort to brute force, for this would be pointless, God will win at every point and no fun at all. But the God of Jesus Christ is quite different, since he deliberately shares his power and his very life with his creation, to the extent of sending one absolutely like himself in human form to be with us and live out a human life of total gift of self, even to the extent of being killed by us. My goodness, what a shock this must have been to humanity in general and to Jews, all in bondage to the ancient tradition of violence and supremacy. Jesus, the Father’s master card, lays bare the age old fallacy that God is ‘just like us only bigger’, and in its place gives us Jesus, Man of Sorrows, who will pour himself out for the salvation of the world, loved into being by God and redeemed by that overwhelming love.
In 1 Kings (19:9.11-13) we meet Elijah fleeing from the wrath of Ahab and Jezebel after he has slaughtered the prophets of Baal, so is in hiding. God meets the prophet in a picture of cosmic chaos and violence, earth forming violence of wind, earthquakes and fire, the very stuff of geological refashioning of creation, a picture of enormous power, the work of millennia. And God, we are told, was not in these forces but instead to be met in a gentle breeze, the gentleness of the divine, which causes Elijah to cover his face in respect for the God he faces. Significantly, the prophet is required to go, as we read on, and anoint Elisha as his replacement; and who during the yet more wars which followed would inevitably kill others of the nation’s enemies. They were to be stuck, it appears, in the rut of endless violence.
Over the last weeks we have been following Romans. (9:1-5) Paul’s great lament for his nation irretrievably stuck with the law which, far from becoming a source of grace and liberation in their relationship with God, has become a block, confining its members in the existing and unforgiving valuation of those who are acceptable to God, the ‘righteous’, and those who are not; but rather ‘sinners’ and doomed to be cut off from this relationship for time honoured recognised faults such as illness, poverty or even death. Paul, a Pharisee who has experienced the grace of Jesus, and once experienced knows that his world is forever different and that ‘Nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’, is utterly appalled by the Jewish failure to recognise the grace he has met in Jesus, the perfect copy of God’s nature. Indeed, so torn apart is he by this knowledge that we find in our reading that he would be willing, after the pattern of Jesus himself, to give his own life to save them, literally, his sarx, his own flesh, twice repeated, if it could bring them to Christ! Clearly, from the passage, he is being mentally torn limb from limb, in agony that his race, so gifted for centuries by God with the knowledge of God should have rejected the Christ when he came – and literally one of their own flesh and blood too!
In Matthew (14:22-33) we meet Jesus by the Sea of Galilee. He has been revealing his identity to the disciples and the crowds by way of parables, here the Sower, the Mustard tree, the wheat and the darnel and then the treasure in the field and the pearl of invaluable worth all of which illustrate what the kingdom, or God, is like. Subsequently we have heard of the beheading of John the Baptist, forerunner of Christ and martyr and gone on to experience the superabundance of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the great image of what God is like, endlessly giving. Jesus sends the disciples ahead, and goes off into the hills to pray, an ancient image of the place of communion with the divine. He catches up with the boat in a storm on the lake and hopes to test out the disciples understanding of his identity by walking to meet the boat, and calming their fears that he is a ghost, and then allowing Peter to walk towards him on the lake. All went well for a time until Peter, eyes off Christ, sinks and screams for help and of course is rescued by Jesus. Immediately all is well, the storm ceases and the disciples, quite overcome, prostrate themselves before Jesus. Clearly, they have been utterly terrified by these disclosures, and whilst they acclaim him as ‘Truly you are the Son of God,’ sadly thereafter, things appear to go back to normal, with scribes and Pharisees hassling Jesus over his lack of conformity, and the disciples really not at all sure what to make of him. We will have further feedings, rows, and by 16:21, the first of Jesus’ predictions of his passion, vehemently rejected by Peter. This pattern will continue right through until after the resurrection, with highs – the Transfiguration - and lows two further passion predictions, the betrayals and death of Jesus. It will take a great deal – resurrection from death itself - to convince the disciples and turn them from those who love and admire Jesus, but who cannot escape the clinging power of their Judaism during his lifetime, to grasp the new and astonishing power which is His and indeed gifted to them for the outreach of God to percolate through to the world. What all this has been about, as Paul recognised and spoke of so eloquently, is the astounding recognition that we are called to be Godlike; the overturning of worldly ways and understanding of power. The fact that our world continues to be ruled by violence and cruelty and not the gift and sharing which so significantly marked the life of Jesus, means we all have a very long way to go; but our scriptures have it written on every page, and from them we are invited to learn the message of God’s remarkable gift of himself to his creation. Only by throwing oneself away in gift, like Jesus, will we ever accept him as he truly is, and the remarkable thing is that we can and do achieve this in the tiny moments of grace given us in Christ.
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