ORDINARY SUNDAY 2 / EPIPHANY 2
(17th January) 1988
In two readings* today we find God radically transforming the lives of otherwise quite unremarkable persons. In the first reading, Samuel and in the gospel reading three of the twelve closest followers of Jesus experience remarkable transformation of their lives.
I believe that the writings of the Bible must always be read with an understanding of the time and thought structure of the various societies in which they were written. Early this century a German theologian adopted the term “de-mythologize” to mean approximately what I have just said: we must read the Bible with a realisation that it is impregnated with metaphorical language that belongs to a way of seeing the world totally different to our own.
In our reading from Samuel this morning, therefore, we hear of the young child’s experience of hearing God’s voice in the dark. It may well be that if we had had a tape recorder running in Samuel’s room that night it would have picked up no sound. “The voice of God” is a metaphor for sudden understanding or insight that we receive through the grace of God.
I labour this point because I feel it is at best misleading or at worst plain dishonest to speak in this kind of mythological language in the 1980s and ’90s. My friends in the Pentecostal churches to which I once belonged would talk often of hearing God speak to them or of seeing a vision, to the extent that I often came to wonder if we were speaking of the same God, or, worse, whether I had in my conversion encountered God at all. I heard no voice, nor saw any vision, but simply grew in my experience of God’s intangible but transforming love.
But in our gospel reading today I believe we see something quite close to what we might describe as contemporary experience of encounter with God.
Admittedly, our central characters in the gospel reading are encountering the enfleshed, incarnate, human Jesus. But that does not alter my point. For Jesus was not, as films like Jesus of Nazareth tend to portray him, some instantly identifiable “super-guru,” but rather an ordinary Palestinian human being. He was as one song much loved by many of my friends expresses it, “an ordinary bloke.” The man who so impressed Andrew, Simon/Peter, and the other unnamed disciple would have come across to them simply as an enormously holy, God-centred bloke. A man of God, very, very human.
And surely, if we are to talk in the 1980s and ’90s of God speaking to us at all then it is that we should make clear. We are not speaking superstitious nonsense about voices in the dark, (for superstitious such talk must be in the rational era in which we live), but about the knowledge of the presence of God in the ordinariness of our day-to-day existence. God commands us to be Christ to our neighbour, commands us to be his mouthpiece in the world, and similarly gives our neighbour the responsibility, or at least the potential, to be God’s mouthpiece to us. Those, of course, who are “in Christ,” the baptised, the believers who seek genuinely to serve God with all their lives, are better equipped to speak God’s message to us, because they, like a good spouse, are far closer, far more attuned to the Spirit of God, to the heart of the Creator. But, lest that sound facile, let me add that this is only partially true. For an Atheist or Hindu or Muslim whose code is love is closer to the heart of God then the Christian whose code is power, entertainment or money.
And we, too, in prayer and in reading and meditation on the words of biblical and other spiritual writers, should seek to make ourselves, to allow ourselves to be more capable of being, by our lives and words, mouthpieces of the God we love.
It has been said that we become what we contemplate. The reading today from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, which is, I might add, one of the most difficult readings to be rostered to read, serves to remind us of that fact. Paul wrote his tirade against sexual liberality not because he held any puritanical obsession with the subjects but because he saw only too well that all forms of indulgent self-satisfaction, whether sexual, financial, intellectual, even spiritual, all such self-satisfaction serves only to distract us from contemplation of God, and therefore hinders us from becoming wholly effective communicators of God’s word of love and healing.
Let me tell you a story from my own experience that illustrates the manner in which God has chosen to communicate to his world in this era. I am often asked how I experienced my call to priesthood – many of you will have read this account in a parish newsletter earlier this year. In reply I tell of the occasion when I was hitchhiking back to university in New Zealand, and was picked up by an elderly Catholic on his way home from the races. As we talked he asked me what I planned to do with my arts degree, and having told him I added almost flippantly “of course, if all else fails, I could become a priest.” For twenty minutes that stranger enthused to me about the responsibilities and rewards of the priesthood, Told me of his own sorrow at his own failings, and of his disappointment and self-blame that none of his sons had entered the priesthood – or even kept the faith. The seeds of an idea were sown that afternoon, though I thought little of it at the time.
So: let me leave you with three thoughts. The first is that if we wait for blinding lights or voices in the dark we may well miss the countless opportunities God allows us to know and to be transformed by his love. Andrew, Simon/Peter, and the other unnamed disciple of John the Baptist came to follow Jesus because they were impressed by the sincerity of “an ordinary bloke.”
Secondly, we must not in this era embellish our experience of God. Our experience of God may not be able to compete with the hype that surrounds the promotion of all things from soap to cricket to politics, but nevertheless it is a pearl of far greater price. In this era of gross overstatement we must seek to communicate our experience of God by contrast; we must communicate God’s love in simplicity and gentle understatement.
And, finally, we must be prepared to take responsibility to contemplate God in stillness and simplicity so that gently we may be transformed into his likeness. Then we may, like Jesus, communicate with a word or a touch God’s word to our neighbour.
*1 Samuel 3: 1-10, John 1:34-51
No comments:
Post a Comment