Day: June 18, 2023

“Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God”

Something of the charity of Christ is at work in our dealings with one another. It is about more though not less than good manners and civility.

This is a central theme in the Trinity season. We participate in what is proclaimed. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as John says in his 1st Epistle and which becomes the recurring refrain of the Trinity season. There is a necessary, inescapable and intimate relation between the making known of God in Jesus Christ and the form of our life in Christ. In today’s Epistle, John drives home a very hard lesson that follows from that understanding. It is about our love towards those towards whom we may feel anything but love and affection, kindliness and concern. There may be things about our brother or sister (let’s not be gender exclusive!) that are quite unlovely, even hateful.

What, then, are we called to love in those whom, quite frankly, we can’t stand? Simply this, we honour their being made in the image of God, howsoever much that image has been obscured, denied and derided, howsoever much we ourselves may be confused and deluded in our judgment. This provokes the equally salutary thought. Our awareness of our judgmentalism leads to self-judgment. Yet that, too, can be quite destructive; self-condemnation easily leads to despair. But here is the strong counter: “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” In every way, we are being encouraged, if not actually catapulted into the mystery of God which we have been privileged to hear and receive. This is the astounding teaching: we are more though not less than our thoughts and actions. To be catapulted into the mystery of God is to know that we are loved and known in God; a check upon our own presumption.

It belongs to the joy of the Trinity season to place us in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity. Trinity season is about going through the open door or, at the very least, standing on the threshold of that open door of the kingdom of heaven. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, but we don’t always see it, do we? Yet, the realities of the kingdom are here and now, present in our daily lives, before our very eyes. Thus we have a parable about the kingdom told by Jesus: “A certain man made a great supper and bade many.”

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