Forgiven before we ask

Reflections on the Readings for Sunday 19 February 2012

Isaiah 43:18-19, 21-22, 24b-25; Psalm 41:2-5, 13-14; 2 Corinthians 1:18-22; Mark 2:1-12

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ words and actions demonstrate the Kingdom of God. As we watch Jesus and listen to him, we come to understand what life looks like when God’s will is done on earth, when God is present. In the Gospel readings over the last few weeks, we have seen aspects of God’s kingdom breaking in. The casting out of the demon in the synagogue showed God’s victory over the powers of darkness; the healing stories showed God bringing wholeness to the broken; Jesus’ touching the leper challenged the purity system that kept God at a distance and showed the transformative power of holiness. In today’s Gospel, not only does Jesus heal a paralytic, but he also pronounces his sins forgiven. He doesn’t grant absolution to someone who has confessed their sins to God, but confidently proclaims to someone who hasn’t even asked: “Child, your sins are forgiven.” Some people deduce from this that Jesus is working within the worldview of the day which linked sickness and sin, so that he first removes the cause of the man’s ailment before dealing with its effects of paralysis. I don’t think so. Rather, Jesus recognises that what binds and cripples the young man is not only his physical ailment, but also his sense of guilt. To borrow the words of the psalm, his soul needs healing. Jesus restores him to wholeness at every level.

It’s easier to understand the dynamics of the psalm. There the worshipper calls out to God, and is healed and forgiven. This is the graciousness of God that we expect. But the young man in the Gospel doesn’t ask. His friends have demonstrated their faith: their commitment to their friend and confidence in Jesus is such that they’ll even break the roof of someone else’s house to get him close enough. Jesus notices and responds to their faith. But the paralytic himself appears silent.

Isaiah tells us something amazing about God’s commitment to God’s people: God rescues and forgives them even when they haven’t asked. The reading from Isaiah 43 is set during the exile, a time when God’s people were forcibly alienated from their land. The prophets had interpreted the exile as God’s punishment for the sins of the people. But now the prophet tells them to keep their eyes open for something new that God is doing. They looked to the past with nostalgia – remembering the glorious stories of the exodus and the gift of the promised land – and with guilt at their own sinfulness. Now they need to look to the future, and to the present, to see the signs of God at work. They find themselves in a barren space, and the way back seems to be an impenetrable wilderness. But God will make a way for them, and give them abundant water in the desert. Why? Not because they have managed to earn God’s forgiveness, or because they have called out to God. No, it is because they are God’s, and because that is what God is like. It is the nature of God to be compassionate and gracious. Forgiveness, the washing away of their guilt, is not the reward for appropriate penance, but the free gift of God’s grace. Jesus pronounces the paralytic forgiven not because of what he knows of the paralytic, but because of what he knows of God. Forgiveness is given, not earned. It need only be accepted.

If God’s Kingdom is where God is present and reigning, and if God is pure and holy, how can the sinners and the impure be part of that kingdom? They can’t. The solution, though, is not the exclusion of the unrighteous, but the free gift of righteousness to all who will accept it. Jesus reminds us that the holy God is also a forgiving God. Not only does God invite us into the Kingdom, God makes us worthy to enter it. Repentance, a change of heart and mind is not the prerequisite for forgiveness; forgiveness is what makes our repentance possible. As Paul puts it, God is already turned toward us with a resounding ‘yes!’ What radical divine hospitality! Forgiveness, like the Kingdom itself, is pure gift. And it is already ours in Christ Jesus.

Holiness

Reflections on the Readings for Sunday 12 February 2012

Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46; Psalm 32:1-2, 5, 11; 1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45

The Old Testament law includes a purity system which designated certain people, things and conditions ‘unclean’. For example, someone with a skin disease had to be separated from the community until the disease cleared up. In a society with very little medical knowledge, such caution may be explained in terms of preserving the health of the community by guarding against the spread of contagious diseases. But it also had a religious rationale, and extended beyond contagious diseases to various kinds of foods and events such as childbirth which rendered the mother unclean for a period of time. Because God is holy, God’s people were to be holy. The system of classifying things as unclean and the rituals associated with cleansing all underlined the holy nature of God and God’s people. One had to avoid the unclean, such as people with a skin disease, since uncleanness contaminates.

In addition to showing us the compassionate heart of Jesus, the story of the healing of the leper tells us something very significant about the Kingdom of God, something which undermined the religious system of Jesus’ day. Jesus does not simply heal the man; he reaches out and touches him while he is still unclean. Jesus does not understand holiness as something to be preserved from contamination but as something that has transformative power. Holiness, or wholeness, is contagious, not uncleanness! This is why Jesus touches lepers and eats with tax collectors and prostitutes. God is not a holy God who remains apart, but a loving God who connects with the outcasts. This is one of the reasons that Jesus encountered such fierce opposition from the religious authorities. He was disregarding the rules and regulations that separated people into categories which gave some privileged access to God while excluding others.

The leper discovers in Jesus not only the healer, but the one who completely accepts him, just as the psalmist discovers in God the one who forgives and removes all guilt. When we come in our sinfulness and brokenness before God, we do not sully God, but find ourselves transformed.

When Paul discovered this, it freed him up to be the apostle to the Gentiles, to those who did not follow the religious laws according to which he himself had been raised. He realised that Jesus had set aside many of the laws which were about enforcing separation between God’s people and the rest of the world. God’s people are supposed to stand out as different, yes, but not because of endless lists of do’s and don’ts. Now when Paul made decisions about what to do or abstain from, his basis for deciding wasn’t in terms of keeping himself pure and undefiled by others, but in terms of reaching others with the love and the salvation of God in Christ. It wasn’t what he ate or drank that made him holy, but the way he lived his life out of concern for others and their wellbeing. This didn’t make him an anarchist, because he wasn’t living any old way he wanted. These verses suggest some helpful questions to ask ourselves regarding our actions if we are to follow his example: Is this for God’s glory or my own? Am I needlessly offending anyone? Am I acting for my own benefit or for the benefit of others? Is my concern the wholeness of the other? Is this what Jesus would do?

Freedom to serve

Reflections on the Readings for Sunday 5 February 2012

Job 7:1-4, 6-7; Psalm 147:1-6; 1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23; Mark 1:29-39

The image of Jesus praying in a deserted place in the predawn darkness is a powerful reminder of the importance of carving out time and space to be by ourselves in God’s presence in the midst of busyness. If Jesus, with his great compassion and patience, his strong sense of mission and closeness to God, needed those times, how much more do I! Amidst all the excitement of seeing God at work, of being the conduit for the healing and restoring and liberating power of God, Jesus needed time for stillness. He emerges energised and focused. It would have been so easy to have his movements dictated to by the needs and desires of others or by their acclaim and approval. He could have chosen to stay where he was comfortable – let the people come to him. But instead he goes on to other villages seeking those in need and proclaiming in word and in deed the Kingdom of God.

Paul shared this sense of calling. Like Jesus, he has been given the task of proclaiming the good news of God. He feels himself to be both bound and free. On the one hand, God’s call is something which shapes his life whether he likes it or not – it is an obligation as well as a privilege. On the other hand he is free to live it out to the full. He is not bound by insecurities or by having to please others. It is precisely this freedom that allows him to accommodate himself to the needs of others. When he choses to do something or not to do it, he is not operating out of his own neediness or from a sense that he needs to keep a whole bunch of rules. He is free to act out of love, to create a hospitable space for others.

Job’s despairing words remind me how desperately at times people need that hospitable space. And Job’s friends are a good example of how one’s own agendas and insecurities can prevent one from providing it. Their uselessness as comforters is legendary. As they listened to Job pouring out words like this, their own sense of the world was threatened, and so they tried to impose interpretations on Job and his experience. They did not respond to Job’s need, but to their own need for order and meaning in life. The didn’t have the freedom of which Paul speaks, the self-forgetfulness that would have enabled them to be the supportive presence and the containers for Job’s grief and rage which he so desperately needed.

Hearing God’s Voice

Reflections on the Readings for Sunday 29 January 2012

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 95:1-2, 6-9; 1 Corinthians 7:32-35; Mark 1:21-28

Finding God seems to me a perpetual game of hide and seek, I wonder what it would be like to stand in God’s awesome unmistakable presence. The people of God had that opportunity at Sinai, here called Horeb, but discovered that it was too much for them. They literally begged Moses not to have to hear God’s voice or see the signs of God’s holiness. And so Moses stands in the breach as a mediator of God’s words. I have always thought of a prophet as one who brings God close, but here their role is almost to keep God at a safe distance, so that the ordinary person can get along without having to face God directly.

The danger is that, in not having to face God directly, it was easier for them not to take God seriously. The story of God’s people after Sinai on their journey to the promised land is one of rebellion, as today’s psalm reminds us. But the mood of the psalm is predominantly hopeful – as we worship God and come into God’s presence, we are open to the possibility of hearing God’s voice, and capable of responding.

By the time of Jesus, the role of the prophet had been largely eclipsed by the role of the scribe, the interpreter of the written collections of the inspired words of the prophets. As a biblical scholar myself, I don’t like to denigrate the function of the scribe, but it seems that the people’s experience of their teaching was a watered down kind of teaching that kept God at even greater remove from them. What amazed the people about Jesus was the authority with which he spoke and the way he directly confronted the spiritual powers that bound people. Here is no second-hand knowledge being passed down from generation to generation. The living God who made the mountain quake at Sinai is present in this Galilean carpenter.

I don’t really know what to make of Paul’s praise of the single life. I do sometimes envy the seemingly unencumbered lives of friends and colleagues who are priests and religious. I know that it is a calling for some. But my own much messier and chaotic life with a husband and children is also a calling, and I hope that my commitment to the Lord is lived out within and not despite it. As a ‘scribe’ I understand Paul’s context, why in the circumstances in which he is writing he wants his audience to seriously consider the single life as a conscious choice. I recognise Paul’s prophetic function: as one who has stood in God’s presence, he has wisdom to impart which must be taken seriously. But as an ordinary human being who is in Christ, and who has the Spirit dwelling within me, I too can hear God’s voice. I am not called to simply obey Paul’s words, but to hear God’s own words to me through them. I hear in Paul’s words a challenge to look carefully at my life to discern the distractions that I should let go of. I ask myself where and how I make my life needlessly complicated, and what activities and commitments get in the way of my commitment to God. And I am reminded again of how my family life is part and parcel of how I serve and where I find God.

Responding to God’s Call

Reflections on the Readings for Sunday 22 January 2012

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 25:4-9; Mark 1:14-20; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31

If one didn’t know the story of Jonah, you’d be forgiven for assuming from the reading that this is a perfectly conventional story of a prophet who hears God’s call and obeys and who sees the fruit of his labours when his audience repents. Of course, the story is much more ironic and convoluted than that. This is the second call that Jonah receives. His response the first time is to head off in the opposite direction. It is only after his own ‘repentance’ or turning around, facilitated by an almighty storm at sea and a trip in the belly of a fish, that he sets out to do what God told him to. He doesn’t actually preach repentance to the arch-enemies of God’s people but simply announces their destruction. When they immediately respond by repenting, God completely forgives them as Jonah had feared God would. The pagans can teach the prophet a thing or two about taking the word of the Lord seriously!

Jonah’s own spirituality is miles away from that expressed in Psalm 25. In the previous chapter of the book, prior to his belated obedience recounted in the reading, Jonah sings a psalm of thanksgiving from inside the fish. But even while he thanks God for deliverance, he subtly blames God for his predicament. He also thanks God that he isn’t like the ignorant pagans who forfeit God’s grace. The huge irony is that it is precisely the pagans in the book of Jonah, both the sailors on the ship and the Ninevites, who take God seriously, respond appropriately, and experience God’s grace. In the next chapter, Jonah will accuse God of being compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love. For him these are real drawbacks in God’s character, because it means that God doesn’t hate the people Jonah hates. The worshippers who pray the psalm, by contrast, really want to know God’s ways. They know how dependent they are upon the compassionate kindness of God themselves, and are deeply grateful for it.

The Gospel reading also has the themes of repentance and call, but the whole tone is so different from Jonah’s. Here Jesus proclaims God’s word, but instead of a proclamation of destruction, it is a joyous announcement of the coming of God’s kingdom. Jonah didn’t call on the people to repent – he didn’t want them to. In fact their repentance and God’s forgiveness was the last thing he wanted for them. Jesus isn’t warning his audience to change their ways in order to hold off God’s wrath; he calls them to reorient themselves so that they are able to receive and enter the kingdom. The call is then given specifically to two sets of brothers, fishermen at work. They leave what they are doing and follow. What motivated them was not fear, but attraction. Jesus must have fascinated and intrigued them, his call must have resonated with their own inner longing so that they are willing to step into something new.

Paul also lived with a sense of the kingdom of God being at hand. He advocates the kind of attitude that can drop everything to follow God’s call wherever it leads. His words can be interpreted in a very world-denying way but they need not be. There is a huge if subtle difference between disengagement and detachment. Why would we turn our back on this embodied life that is God’s gift to us, with its relationships, emotions, work to do? But it is one thing to be engaged, it is quite another to be entangled and overwhelmed. In the detached life we hold all these things but we are not trapped by them. The things we own must not own us. Our emotions, deeply felt, are the sun that shines upon and the storms that buffet the landscape of our souls, but they are not the sum total of our selves. In our deepest self we remain free to respond to God’s call, to let go of whatever could hold us back, and to follow Jesus.

God’s call

Reflections on the Readings for Sunday 15 January 2012

1 Samuel 3:3b-10, 19; Psalm 40:2, 4, 7-10; 1 Corinthians 6:13c-15a, 17-20; John 1:35-42

The young Samuel heard God’s call in the temple at night, but he didn’t recognise it as God’s voice until Eli identified it for him. Eli was an ineffective mentor to his own sons, unable to stop their contemptuous abuse of religious rituals, but he had the wisdom to direct Samuel’s response to God. And so began Samuel’s life as a prophet who heard and declared the word of God.

The way John recounts it, the calling of Jesus’ first disciples isn’t exactly a calling in the conventional sense. Instead two disciples of John the Baptist, hearing their master’s description of Jesus as the Lamb of God, set off after him. Jesus’ question to them – ‘What are you looking for?’ – is an interesting question for us to ponder ourselves. What are we actually looking for, really? They answer with a question of their own: ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ They may not be able to find words for their curiosity or verbalise their longing, but they know that whatever it is they are searching for, Jesus is the key. Jesus’ reply, on one level a simple invitation to accompany him, on another level describes the path of discipleship, the path of finding and living out our calling: ‘Come and see’. It is in journeying with Jesus that they will discover what they seek. After the first afternoon spent with Jesus, the experience is so captivating that Andrew seeks out his brother Simon Peter to join them.

I like the way today’s psalm begins – I waited and waited. That’s the experience of so many of us as we try to hear God’s voice and God’s call in our own life. It takes time and attentive listening to discover the song that God has given us to sing. The calling is to live a life of obedience to God. And that life doesn’t look like lots of religious activity, but consists in actually doing God’s will. In essence, it is to say ‘Here I am” when God calls.

Paul reminds us that we belong to God in our entirety, not just our spirituality. Our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. His point in this passage is about moral living, that we cannot divorce our physical life from the spiritual, but I’ll apply it in a slightly different way. Samuel was asleep in the temple when he heard God calling him. But if we are the temple within which the Spirit of God dwells, then maybe that’s where we’ll hear God’s call – written into the way God has formed and made us. We discover God’s call within our embodied experience in the real world. Perhaps our calling in life is to bring glory to God by being fully ourselves – not the person we’d like to be, or who others would like us to be, but the person we are created to be.

The Magi

Reflections on the Readings for Sunday 8 January 2012

Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-2, 7-8, 10-13; Ephesians 2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

The story of the magi journeying to Bethlehem is a fitting image to reflect on near the beginning of our own journeys into 2012. They are astrologers who know the stars, but this star is different. They know something of its meaning – ‘the newborn king of the Jews’ – but it doesn’t lead exactly where they thought it would, and the king they find is not the king they were expecting. They journey to Jerusalem, sure that they will find him there. But the prophet’s words direct them elsewhere, to little Bethlehem, and the star takes them to their destination. The restful, worshipful space around the child where they give their gifts is surrounded by great evil and danger, a light within deep darkness; Herod has tried to deceive them into revealing the whereabouts of the child so that he can destroy this challenge to his power. But the magi listen to the wisdom in their dreams, and do not return via Jerusalem, evading the trap Herod has set for them. Their journey does not end in Bethlehem, but they return home carrying this new light in their hearts, with all the promise and challenge and disruption to their old life which that entails.

The presence of the three magi in the Christmas tableau is a striking reminder of the mystery of which Paul speaks – ‘that the Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same body, and co-partners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel’. The outsiders have been brought into the circle of light around the Christ child. The barriers that separate ‘us’ and ‘them’ have been removed. Membership of the people of God is open to everyone.