Month: October 2023

“Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called”

So Paul bids us and so Luke shows us. What is that vocation? It is about our life in Christ. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling,” we are told. And what is that calling? That there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” Paul in Ephesians gives us a clear and objective statement of faith. But how does it become our faith? That too is stated: “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

This counters all of the empty assertions and personal faith or identity claims that beset an anxious and fearful world in which we are increasingly isolated and alone, separated and divided from all that makes us human. This is the antithesis of the culture of “look at me looking at you looking at me,’ a culture which is essentially narcissistic and empty, in other words, nihilistic, even as it seeks for meaning in belonging to whatever seems to offer self-affirmation. Belonging not believing. Paul is talking about both. And believing, not as some form of personal assertion or opinion, but as holding onto what is transcendent, true, and God-given, is the condition of our belonging. We belong to what is greater than ourselves. To know that is the saving grace which counters our self-pretension and self-righteousness. We are known in the loving embrace of God.

“Friend, go up higher.” This too is our calling in Christ. Not on the basis of our presumption and claims to greatness. Based on what? Our sense of self-importance which is really about our claims to entitlement and privilege over others? That is to miss the whole point of our calling. The Gospel shows us the great misreading and misunderstanding about the Law, particularly the fourth commandment about the Sabbath. As Jesus famously says, drawing upon the example of King David, “the sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath,” for the sabbath is given not as burden but as a blessing. It belongs to what God seeks for our humanity; our wholeness and completeness as found in Him, signaled in Paul’s words about our life in Christ.

The sabbath is given as a time for prayerful reflection and meditation upon the truth of God and his creation and our place within it without which our thoughts and actions become deceptive, delusional, self-seeking and thus divisive and destructive. “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?”, Jesus asks rhetorically to the Lawyers and Pharisees who have watched him with critical and judgemental eyes. He names their hypocrisy. For if is not lawful then we would be justified in ignoring the needs of one another; holding to the letter of the law while denying its truth and spirit. Such is the evil of self-righteousness and hypocrisy as Jesus shows. “Which of you shall have an ass, or an ox, fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?” One cannot miss the irony of his question in preferring our animal possessions to the care of human beings. “And they could not answer him again to these things.” They are convicted in their consciences and so are we.

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