A Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings:-
Quite a lot of the time I suspect, most of us simply think of God as far distant from us and that way it’s so much easier to cope. We don’t have to take on board the difficulties any real relationship between ourselves and the divine might entail. The problem with this way of thinking, be its leading to Mass attendance where we leg it immediately after receiving Communion, or where we separate our belief from the ordinary world, is that this quite simply was never the Jewish or the Christian way of behaving, despite the teaching of some priests down through the ages or with the practise of Judaism.
Our Reading from Deuteronomy (30:10-14), that book of religious reform of the 7th century BCE, is explicit ; ‘This law that I enjoin on you today is not beyond your strength or your reach…..No, the Word is very near you’. In fact it is placed in the context of Covenant renewals, moments of sacred intimacy between Jews and God on their Exodus journeys, and as such was what the People of Israel always aimed for, so much so that the nation saw these events as a wedding between God and Israel, intense, intimate and fruitful. Sadly though, somewhere along its great journey to God, Judaism in discovery of this intense relationship understood themselves as radically different from all the pagans around them, and set up hundreds of rules, laws to distinguish themselves from others and over time these actually became a huge barrier to interaction. God was not for sharing but for separation!
Yet this was by no means the vision of the Major Prophets of Israel, who retained their older vision of the universality of God’s outreach and as we know frequently suffered for it. When Paul wrote from prison c.53 CE to the converts to Christianity in Colossae, in Turkey (Colossians 1:15-20) it appears that he too, who rejected the Jewish separatism which cut them off from other nations, followed this inclusive agenda just as he knew had been the habit of Jesus and of the Church. Indeed his attitude to those who insisted on circumcision and the law as fundamental to Christian belonging could be startlingly crude in this letter. To press home his point he recited a creedal statement known to his fellow missionaries, which we have here, telling of the absolute supremacy of Christ. In some ways this passage is a forerunner of John’s fabulous Prologue which kicks off his Gospel, Jesus is the Icon of the invisible God, a perfect copy and akin to him in all things. Existing before the creation, he is quite simply universal creator, and the one who – wait for it - by his death as a human being on the cross (the worst possible in degradation) has ‘Reconciled…..everything in heaven and on earth”, since God “Wanted all perfection to be found in him.’ ALL THINGS, ALL CREATION! Well, that put an end to any idea that some were special, superior to others, or could claim to be different.
Luke (10:25-37) quite deliberately sets out to illustrate this point for his patron, the super rich Theophilus and his fellow converts, who, unlike Jews had their own issues over who was in and who out. By the time Jesus came to tell this story, we have had two predictions by him of his Passion, so things are pretty black, and Peter has acclaimed his identity; but as we saw in last week’s Gospel, relations with the Judaism of Jesus’ day were getting ever more difficult. Here in our story, in which we should not ignore the gently ironic humour of the Lord, we find a Jew who is mugged and left for dead on the Jericho road. Two Temple officials pass by, one a priest and the other a Levite, a Temple functionary, so Law abiding and upright. Both decide to leave well alone and avoid ritual contamination by possible corpse contact, leaving a brother to his fate. Then along comes a Samaritan, one divided from Jerusalem Judaism since the Assyrian conquest of the 8th century BCE (you can tell this division is therefore well established); and Jerusalem despised those in Samaria who had their own temple on Mount Gerizim and followed different customs. Off his mount he jumps, without a thought for his own safety and who was lurking behind the next rock, and he tenderly cares for the wounded man (traumatised in Greek) and here comes Jesus hit-line, he takes him to the next inn, places notorious for bad food, bad company, and above all where your bill commonly included the services of the local prostitute, so ritual pollution all round. Then, in an act of near insanity, leaves the innkeeper with cash to care for the man and promises to make good any further payment. ‘He must have been an idiot’ everyone was saying, as the inn keeper would undoubtedly rip him off. I think that what we have here is Jesus’ anarchic vision of the Kingdom, lived with the same self-oblation he would make on the cross, and offering every human being an opportunity to act as alter Christi. It is Jesus’ great sign of the universality of salvation given to all humankind by its creator, and promised since before creation. Jesus lived and died with the utter freedom of ‘The one who existed before anything was created’ and he is the one who ‘creates all things’. No law, no one, dictates any rules to him. He is master of the universe, and the one who invites you and me to live in the sovereign freedom of his gift, sons and daughters in the Son
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