“You are not your own”
Scripture tests our patience. But more often than not, it is about our willingness to hear and not simply our lack of understanding.
Today’s lessons are a case in point. The lesson from Genesis is the story of the blessing of Jacob, a story of deceit really, because Jacob disguises himself as Esau and takes his place, thereby robbing his brother Esau of his birthright, the blessing of the first-born. Jacob uses cunning or guile to obtain what he wants. And yet, Jacob will become Israel by wrestling with an angel, wrestling with God, with whom there can be no deceit. There is, in short, a transformation which takes place. Jacob, the man of guile, becomes Israel, “in whom there is no guile”, as Jesus says about a later Israelite, Nathaniel.
In other words, there is hope for us all! There is the hope of change for the better in our lives, the hope of transformation, the hope for something more than the endless and dreary round of our same-old sins which, if not deadly, at least deaden us to the life-giving reality of God’s Word. In the case of Jacob, God is able to make something good out of the treachery and betrayals of our lives, even out of our own treachery and betrayal.
Genesis can be read as a set of stories about brothers: Cain and Abel, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. Through the various spectacles of sibling rivalry, God forges a people for himself through whom his will for all peoples is proclaimed. But are we willing to listen and attend to these stories?
The universal element of these particular stories comes to fuller expression in the New Testament. We can see this in the second lesson from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. It provides an argument for a certain kind of moral behaviour, one which is not based merely on convention or custom or even on some kind of positive law which might then be changed, but on a matter of principle. But what is that principle? It is the principle of our identity with God and the obligations that arise from that reality. “The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” Are not these the things about which our culture is most confused? But are we willing to hear this word? Or will we be like Esau and sell our birthright for a mess of potage?
The point is made even stronger, “you are not your own”. We are God’s and so must strive to live our lives in such a way as to honour him. Morals are grounded in our mystical and spiritual lives with God, the God with whom we wrestle, “put[ting] not our trust in anything that we do”, but in Him alone whose own we are. “Do you not know,” St. Paul reminds us, “that your bodies are members of Christ?” Our spiritual identity in Christ embraces every aspect of our lives.
Like the parable of the sower and the seed in the Eucharistic Gospel for today, at issue is whether we will hear and act upon what we hear; only so can we hope to bring “forth fruit with patience”. Something is required of us. What is required is that we work with the grace of God that is given to us; in short, to be the good ground where the Word of God has not been sown in vain.
The Eucharistic gospel is very clear about what it means to be the good ground: “they which in an honest and a good heart having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience”. The kind of hearing that is meant here is an active listening. It means to listen and think, and to think and act upon what we have heard, letting the Word that has been spoken and heard live and move in us. Such is the dynamic of grace that perfects our weary and broken humanity. It recalls us to who we are in the sight of God and reminds us that we are not our own. We are God’s children and people.
“You are not your own”
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima, 2014
MP, Year II