Month: July 2017

“How can any one satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?”

It is a good question and one which haunts our age of extreme affluence, on the one hand, and extreme poverty, on the other hand, an age of extremes despite the claims to the reduction of universal poverty overall which may indeed be true but tell that to those in radical need! But the Gospel speaks to another kind of poverty which underlies each and every other form of poverty. It is spiritual poverty, the poverty that belongs to our neglect of God and as a consequence to what God constantly provides for us.

In a way, the Gospel presents to us a fairly common biblical theme, the idea of God feeding his people in the wilderness journey. What is that journey? It is about our life to God and with God in the learning about the will and purpose of our life with God. This Gospel story explicitly recalls the provisions which God makes for his people in the wilderness of Sinai. Tough lessons actually. There is a certain reluctance among the children of the Hebrews to accept the discipline, the learning. The lessons are more intellectual and spiritual, we might say, than simply material.

And therein lies the difficulty. It is the constant temptation to measure the reality of God by way of our immediate material concerns. It is not that they don’t matter; they do. It is just that they are subordinate and depend upon something far more radical. The physical and material world is not nothing but neither is it everything, a point which the teaching of the Law of Moses makes clear as does the Gospel of the Resurrection. It is in the light of those ideas that we best make sense of this Gospel pericope. It recalls Deuteronomy’s claim that “man cannot live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God.” That does not deny the need for bread – for food – but it conditions that need by placing it squarely within the providence of God revealed in the Word of God as Law. There can be no bread without the Word of God in creation.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Love your enemies”

It remains to be seen for whom this shall be harder, for Silas, for you, for the grandparents, or even a great grandmother? It is, after all, all theology, as it must be. At least there is a party after!

“Love your enemies.” Is this one of the so-called values of the so-called West? If so then hardly one which we live up to in a world of ‘them’ and ‘us’, whoever ‘them’ and ‘us’ are. A hard saying, and yet one which articulates with remarkable directness and clarity an insight fundamental to the various traditions of philosophical religion. It speaks profoundly to our common humanity, to what transcends the tribalisms of culture, nation, family and religion and to the problems of identity and belonging that divide us into ‘them’ and ‘us’. A hard saying but no less true for being hard. Hard sayings are de rigueur.

The hard sayings of Jesus challenge us about belief as distinct from belonging. “I am the bread which came down from heaven”, Jesus said but the response? “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”, they said. The consequence was that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.” Enmity and division where truth and unity are sought. Yet, “love your enemies”!

Hard sayings trouble us. But they belong to the truth of our humanity. “Ye must be born again”, Jesus tells Nicodemus in the great gospel for Trinity Sunday. “How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks. Is not birth hard enough on its own? But to be born again? “How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb?” Nicodemus takes the statement literally to which Jesus responds by explaining the difference between flesh and spirit and their relationship. “Ye must be born again” means something of another order just as the wind blows where it wills and you cannot tell “whence it cometh and wither it goeth; so is everyone born of the Spirit.” This, it seems, is the hard saying. “How can these things be?”

And so for Silas Barry King today. He is born again. Born into the mystery of God with us. And such a rebirth, such a new birth, is of another order and one which transcends all of the divisions and enmities of our world and day. “Love your enemies” is the Scriptural phrase which captures the great and powerful logic of reconciliation and unity that belongs to philosophical religion. It means an entirely different outlook, an entirely different way of thinking. It has entirely to do with our incorporation into the mystery of God. It means being born upward into what has come down to us. Such are the motions of grace about the heavenly things that have been told to us. “No one has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven,” as Jesus patiently but firmly explains to Nicodemus.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Love your enemies”

“Love your enemies”, Jesus says, not “Don’t worry, you don’t have any enemies”. For he knows only too well about our enmities and hatreds. Yet, “love your enemies”, he says. How absolutely impossible! How utterly improbable!

Why, we have the hardest time imaginable loving the more obvious and, dare one say, more ordinary objects of love: our friends and family, our country and world, our God and Saviour. How can it be that we should be commanded to love those that have set their faces, even their hearts, and souls and bodies against us? Yet, the demands of the Gospel are precisely impossible because our ordinary loves are equally impossible. They are all the places of our enmity, too.

Our enemies, after all, are rarely far-off and faceless. They are frequently only too close at hand. Their faces are only too often mirrored by our own. It is we who are at enmity with ourselves, with one another and with God. It is no good pretending that our hearts are not touched by such enmities when our hearts are precisely the places of enmity. But it is precisely in the face of these enmities – these animosities in the soul – that we are bidden, indeed, commanded to love.

The demands of the Gospel are just so radical because they take us to the root of all love without which we cannot love. They take us to the root from which we must learn to love. And that is why Jesus can demand such impossibly high standards of perfection for our lives – because he takes us to the root of all love which must blossom into the perfection of fruitfulness in our lives.

The command to love our enemies is not just an heightened expectation, something more added on, an optional extra, as it were. To the contrary, it belongs to love’s very nature. It is where love most shows itself to be love; where love shows itself to be most free; where love shows itself to be most perfect and complete. For as the Epistle reminds us, “love your enemies” takes us to the Cross as the place of death and life; “love your enemies” recalls us to our baptism by which we are identified with Christ in his Cross-given grace for us. This radical love is nothing less than Christ’s love in us. What is impossible for us on our own account is made possible in us. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

(more…)

Print this entry