Year: 2016

“Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him”

Friends and enemies. Life and death. Peter and Paul. There is richness to our reflections this morning. The Sixth Sunday after Trinity falls this year within the Octave of the great feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, a feast which reminds us ever so strongly of the apostolical and catholic character of the Christian church, her very being, we might say. And yet we seem to confront a series of opposites. There could be, it seems, no greater contrast than between Peter and Paul, the one a poor fisherman, the other, a proud scholar. And yet, as Augustine argues, “they were as one”. What unites them? Christ Jesus. What does that mean? It means that Christ Jesus has overcome all the oppositions, enmities and animosities that are present in the world and in our souls. Such is the strong and rather special teaching of the Gospel. “Love your enemies”, Jesus says, commanding us to do what seems to be utterly impossible especially in a world increasingly defined by strife and tension, uncertainty and conflict, a world of many, many hates. How can we love our enemies? Because Christ loves us.

The truth and unity of the church is found in the confession of Christ and that makes all the difference. “No one can say, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit”, Paul will say, even as Peter famously confesses to Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God”. “Flesh and blood”, Jesus will say, “has not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven”. One of the most dominant metaphors for God in the Old Testament is God as the Rock, the rock which like a father has begotten you, the rock which like a mother has brought you to birth, as the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy puts it. “That rock was Christ”, Paul proclaims, having in mind the wilderness journey of Israel and the stricken rock out of which comes life-giving water. The image is at once static and solid and dynamic and life-giving. Christ, too, is the stricken rock out of whose wounded side water and blood pour forth, the symbols of the sacraments by which we live from him who died and lived again. Jesus will say to Simon Peter, “you are the rock upon which I shall build my church”.

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“Master we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing”

Nada, nothing, nihil, ouden. Simon Peter’s word captures the empty nothingness of our culture and our church. Nihilism is the default position of both. We have toiled or worked, everyone thinks and says. But to what end? Nothing. What does that mean? It means the discovery that our labours, our work, if measured in worldly, practical and economic terms, and in social and political terms, have really all come to nothing. There is only disappointment and uncertainty, fear and anxiety and a whole lot of anger and despair. Just consider the remarkable state of affairs politically, socially, and, economically, in England and the United States. Ask yourself what that is all about. Recognize that while there are many, many factors, much of the phenomenon in England about the European Union and in America about the presidential election is the profound disconnect between a great number of people and their ruling elites. I think that is a fairly obvious and rather banal observation, hardly controversial.

Take it one step further and ask why. The answer, equally obvious, is that there is an obscene concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few and no hope whatsoever especially for a younger generation or for anyone else for that matter. And no, they are not simply spoiled millennials. The folly of the entitlement culture is deeply entrenched and runs across generational lines whether it is about education or health care, to name but two concerns. The problem is a world caught between the largely unregulated market economy of neoliberal capitalism, on the one hand, and the leviathan of the modern market state, on the other hand. Either in collusion or in competition, they contribute to a world of vast inequalities of wealth and a denigration of human labour; in short, to a profound unease. We have begun, it seems, the summer of our discontent.

We face a world where humans increasingly do not matter and the more that people invest themselves in technology as the solution the more alienated and empty and inhuman our world becomes. There is literally nothing to live for in the dystopia that we have created and in which we are all implicated.

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