Month: September 2012

“Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

We seem to be very much in the company of grieving widows and sorrowing mothers! Naomi has lost her husband Elimelech and her two sons who were also the husbands of her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, after whom The Book of Ruth is named. In a way, such situations, though sad, are hardly unique. You only need to think about your own families and your own communities to recall similar sadnesses, sorrows and loss. And yet, as Paul suggests in our second lesson from his Letter to the Philippians such commonplaces of sadness and sorrow, the thing that have happened, can “really serve to advance the Gospel.” Somehow such circumstances can be the occasion in which Christ can be honoured and glorified. In another words, the Scriptures give us ways to face the hard and sad things of human life.

Probably written sometime after the Babylonian exile, The Book of Ruth with its timeless and reflective mood is notionally set in the time of the Judges. In the Christian Bible it is found immediately after The Book of Judges. In a way it is a kind of critical commentary on The Book of Judges, offering a completely contrasting account of Jewish identity and mission. The Book of Judges like many of the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures are written from a kind of exclusionary viewpoint with the emphasis upon Israel as the Chosen People separate and apart from the nations round about. Over and against that stands another perspective which emphasizes the role and mission of Israel as “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” as Isaiah puts it and as the Nunc Dimittis from Luke’s Gospel repeats in our evening liturgy, the idea that what has been proclaimed to Israel is for all people, something universal in principle. These tensions define Jewish history and thought which oscillate between the one and the other.

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“There was war in heaven”

It is hard enough to contemplate the realities of hell on earth let alone to consider war in heaven. Just last Sunday we had the spectacle of the grieving widow and the sorrowing mother, images which in our day are often about the tragic loss of sons and husbands in the theatres of wars all over our war-torn and weary world. Sadly, not even Sunday Schools are safe as the reports this morning from Nairobi, Kenya, indicate. Only the compassion of Christ, it seems, can speak to such hard and harsh realities if anything can.

These harsh realities belong to an ancient understanding about the disorders of our humanity. They recall us to the story of Cain and Abel, the classic story of the first murder, the murder of a brother, fratricide, that arises out of resentment and envy, we might say, at a benefit that another has received. And so begins the long sorry tale of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. The point of the story is that we are in it. Have you thought or said about someone, particularly a sibling, “I hate you!” or worse, “I’ll kill you”? At the very least such things belong to our thoughts and words. I hope not our deeds! The moral point is simple and clear. If looks could kill we would all be dead; even worse, we would all be murderers! In the ancient biblical story, God’s challenging question, “Where is your brother?” speaks to Cain’s conscience which he tries to deny by the age-old phrase, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God reminds him and us, “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”

Nothing, after all, can be hidden from the sight of God. “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid …” We deceive only ourselves.

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“There was war in heaven”

It is hard enough to contemplate the spectacle of war on earth. How much more disturbing to think of war in heaven! For however we think of heaven, if we think of it at all, surely, it is about what is beyond the strife and stress of a weary, and war-torn world. What can it mean to speak of war in heaven?

The ancient biblical story of Cain and Abel is the account of the first murder. A fratricide, the killing of a brother, its intention is to awaken us to a larger sense of our common humanity in its disarray. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is Cain response to God’s convicting question, “Where is your brother?” God’s question in that story echoes and extends God’s first question to us in the whole Bible, “Where are you?” Where we are is very much bound up with one another. Cain’s response is a question of dismissal and denial, a dismissal and a denial of his obligation and concern for his brother and by extension to anyone else.

“Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says. It is a wonderful image that contains within itself volumes upon volumes of the sense of justice that means that no injury, no hurt, no deed of undoing, no act of malice can go unnoticed and overlooked. It opens us out to truth, the truth of God before which we are held accountable, a truth which transcends, but does not ignore the things of our hearts or the things of our hands, both the seen and the unseen. After all, if looks could kill not only would we all be dead, but even worse, we would all be murderers!

But angels? War in heaven? What does any of this have to do with Cain and Abel? The point is already there implicitly in the ancient Genesis story. It is simply this. The struggles between good and evil are cosmic in scope and they are inescapably spiritual struggles with which all spiritual creatures contend.

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

We have seen this picture far too many times. It is the picture of the weeping widow and the grieving mother. Almost every day and for far, far too many years, we have had to contemplate the spectacles of unbearable griefs and unspeakable sorrows: mothers and wives weeping for the loss of their children and husbands obliterated and destroyed in acts of calculated yet mindless violence in the troubled war zones of our world and day, in Kabul, in Aleppo, in Benghazi, to name but a few. Such pictures have become the commonplaces of our culture and, paradoxically, the commentary upon our capacity for compassion.

We have, I fear, become too accustomed to such sights. Grief has become politicized; our emotions have become the battleground for competing political causes. The real casualty is compassion. Compassion has been killed in us. How can it be made to live in us again? That is the purpose of this Gospel story.

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

We have seen this picture far too many times. It is the picture of the weeping widow and the grieving mother. Almost every day and for far, far too many years, we have had to contemplate the spectacles of unbearable griefs and unspeakable sorrows: mothers and wives weeping for the loss of their children and husbands obliterated and destroyed in acts of calculated yet mindless violence in the troubled war zones of our world and day, in Kabul, in Aleppo, in Benghazi, to name but a few. Such pictures have become the commonplaces of our culture and, paradoxically, the commentary upon our capacity for compassion.

We have, I fear, become too accustomed to such sights. Grief has become politicized; our emotions have become the battleground for competing political causes. The real casualty is compassion. Compassion has been killed in us. In its place, there reigns frustration and rage, cynicism and despair at our own impotence. We look upon what we cannot control or perhaps even begin to comprehend. We look and then we look away. We want to run away. Any vestiges of compassion that we might once have felt are swallowed up in bitterness and anger.

And yet, perhaps, just perhaps, another glance at this gospel story might help us to look again and to look again with eyes of compassion, not just cynical disdain, to look with hearts of patient hopefulness, not just crippling despair. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is something here that speaks to the unspeakable griefs of our world and day. In our cynicism and despair, we are like the young man who is dead and who is being carried to his grave. But in the looking again at this poignant picture of a widow’s grief and a mother’s sorrow, perhaps, just perhaps, we shall be raised up in the hope that arises from the compassion of Christ.

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