God's strange mercy
Ordinary Sunday 19, 11 August, 2002
Fr Neville Connell
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
It has been interesting to read how Church newspapers have been selective in reporting Archbishop Rowan Williams' statement at the announcement of his appointment as the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
Thus the Adelaide Church Guardian: "Recent months and recent weeks have been a strange time; it is a curious experience to have your future discussed, your personality, childhood influences and facial hair solemnly examined in the media, and opinions you didn't know you held expounded on your behalf."
Our beloved Melbourne Anglican left those words out, but both papers reported these important remarks: "I have to go on being a priest and a bishop. That is to celebrate God and what God has done in Jesus and to offer in God's name whatever I can discern of God's perspective on the world around, something which involves both challenge and comfort.
Part of the challenge (will be to know) how to speak of God in this
very public position in the middle of a culture which, while it may
show a great deal of nostalgia, fascination and even hunger for the
spiritual, is generally sceptical of Christianity and the Church".
We must always remind ourselves that this is not new, that people have been 'generally sceptical of Christianity and the Church' in every age. And probably in much the same way. There is no new heresy, just the old ones, perhaps in fancy or different clothing.
In our Second Reading for today (Romans 9:1-5),St Paul agonizes over the fact that while he, the up and coming young rabbi, of excellent background and education, may have accepted Jesus as the one the Jewish people had been longing for for centuries, the Messiah whose coming they had been taught to expect, the Jewish people had rejected Jesus.
"What I want to say to you is this: my sorrow is so great, my mental anguish so endless, I could willingly be condemned and be cut off from Christ if it could help my brothers of Israel, my own flesh and blood."
They had been given so much, "They were adopted as sons, they were given the glory and the covenants; the Law and the ritual were drawn up for them, and the promises were made to them."
And they had put their trust in their adoption as the chosen people, in the glory, the presence of God with them, in the covenants God had made with them, in the Law and the ritual of the Temple; and in the promises.
Had familiarity bred contempt, so that when God made himself known to them in His Son Jesus, the carpenter's son from Nazareth (!), they could not even consider it, let alone accept it?
Had their conception, their vision of God become stale, frozen, stereo-typed? God can only behave in this way ... he would never come to us and live with us as a man. St John also reminds in Chapter 1 of his Gospel that Jesus came to his own people and they received him not.
Part of the difficulty lay in the paradox of God's strange mercy: the Jewish people were promised the Messiah, yet rejected Him. As St Paul found, justification, a right relationship with God, was founded on faith, not on pride in one's ancestry, or meticulous attention to keeping the Law or carrying out the Temple ritual. Nor on smug satisfaction in being a child of the Covenant. For those unable to overcome this mindset, God seemed to have failed them.
Our Gospel Reading for today (St Matthew 14:22-33) illustrates this challenge in the journey of St Peter. St Matthew is trying to show us the way of discipleship through St Peter. St Peter had enough faith to want to be like Jesus, and so set out across the water, only to waver when buffeted by the wind – just when he was so close to Jesus that the Lord could reach out his hand to hold him.
This is a very important moment in the spiritual journey. So often we do what St Peter did, pull back just when Jesus could reach out to hold us. These are the moments when we learn much about faith.
Do people pull back, give up, because they think that God has not heard, or is unwilling to respond, or has not responded in the way they, we, think that he should respond?
What God is challenging us to do, is to read by faith the signs we are given; to work with what we are given, not with what we think we should be given.
So Elijah had to learn to discern God's way in the world sometimes in the earthquake, sometimes in the wind, sometimes in the fire. But on this occasion in the "sound of a gentle breeze", the still small voice. This is profoundly important for our Christian journey.
I commend to you our Archbishop's letter in this month's edition of the Melbourne Anglican, on welcoming the present age makeup of so many of our parish communities as God's gift: the wisdom, experience, devotion and faithfulness of older Christians as something needed in a shallow age, so that when younger people return to Jesus, as they will, it will be because of the commitment of older Anglicans, who pressed on in faith.
It is not a matter of being passive recipients, but a matter of responding to grace, to gift, to sign. Just as we have responded to the sign that is up to 30 people coming to breakfast here on weekday mornings.
Or the Brotherhood of St Laurence responded to the needs of the poor of Fitzroy 80 years ago, and still does. And as we respond in worship day by day, and at this High Mass.
In all these ways, and so many others, with Archbishop Williams, we celebrate God, and we offer God to those around us.
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Views is a
publication of
St Peter's Eastern Hill, Melbourne Australia.
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