Engaging with the Scriptures
Third Sunday in Lent: 7th March, 2010
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
I am going to take the opportunity this morning to reflect a little on the place and the witness of the Scriptures in the life of the Christian community. As Christians we indeed start with an engagement with the Scriptures and the central stories and issues that are included in them. Our study group on Thursday during Lent is tackling this very matter with seriousness. Regular daily reading — perhaps by joining with the daily office readings — is a time-honoured way of doing this. For Christians of course the New Testament and most notably the four gospels are the key way we hear of the life and teachings and example of Jesus of Nazareth and where the unfolding and developing story of redemption and salvation and hope is explained. That story is also lived out, generation by generation, in communities of faith transferring and transmitting this understanding in story, in life choices, in worship and in service.
Different generations will have different ways of trying to be faithful to this challenge to engagement with the idea and fact of God in this way. But the resource that is in the Scriptures is so rich as to be able to accommodate more than adequately.
A current example might be for instance to consider a concern for the environment. It would be apparent that it is useful to go to the Genesis creation narratives and there to find the presupposition that the whole of the created order is indeed that: created by God and that it was found to be good. There are also immediate issues of care and shared responsibility that arise. These come under headings of stewardship or custodianship. Accountability might also arise. And if human beings are in some sense presented as being right up there towards the end of the process, then the relationship that we humans are called into with this our God and creator is rich and complex. Much of the Scriptures include references to such basic concepts as 'covenant' and 'promise'. A careful theological reflection beginning with that issue of environment could take us on quite a journey then.
Another issue in this for instance is the observable fact that 'nature' is not benign. There could well be quite striking contrasts in the way that people who live and work on the land and those somewhat more detached in the centre of large cities might come to these questions — or theologically reflect on how the Scriptures present them — though I do suspect that the dimmest of us has not failed to notice the water constraints of the last several years or shuddered at what happened so near to us here last February. In Australia, flood, fire and drought are ever with us, as is land and water degradation or desertification. How does that then sit with the created order being declared to be good? There then for instance would be an opportunity to sit down and grapple a matter of huge current concern, in the context of a Scriptural witness that sees 'the whole creation groaning with eager longing' in the process towards a greater fulfilment and promise that is yet ahead.
So that is just one example. The Scriptures both Old and New Testaments are full of themes ranging from Creation to the Apocalypse. A New Heaven and a New Earth, community codes of living, service and nurture, the challenge of the prophetic, the cry for justice, the wonder of the holy, the abuse and the disregard, the distortion and the twisting, roads not taken, mistakes and betrayals — it is all in there, warts and all, wonders and all.
As we have heard, today's gospel raises another such issue although in a way that almost seems to be incidental. Yet this is a matter of controversy that it is possible to find just about anywhere in the Scriptures and it remains a contested question to this day. It comes in a week when we have all been aware of the scale of the earthquake in Chile coming as it did soon after the smaller but much more devastating in human terms one in Haiti. Natural disaster can include the mixed blessings of the size of the floods in Queensland right now. Will this flooding rain in fact be enough to actually flush out that dying river system all the way to the Murray mouth? May it be so — but then at what cost.
The example in the gospel this morning is deceptively apparently much smaller. If bad things happen on a community wide scale when only some people have broken the rules, is this God at work? (In this particular case it is likely that some religious people had bought meat from the butchers who got their supplies from the animals offered for sacrifice at the various pagan temples.) This is obviously religiously contaminated material. In the civil disturbances that followed, people died. Was this God's will and purpose? The supplementary question asked of Jesus related to a building accident in Jerusalem that had just occurred. Were the 18 people killed when that tower collapsed (or for that matter we might say this week, the 200,000 who died in Haiti) any better or any worse than the ones who did not die? No declares the Lord they were absolutely not. The sun shines on the bad and the good, as does the rain. But nonetheless we are all accountable to God. If we were ones who had escaped where others had not, it would certainly concentrate the mind and perhaps trigger a complete review of options. As the Lord noted, we will in the end all die, just as they have.
But a reflection on this question and the Lord's response declaring that the victims were neither better nor worse might well lead us towards the conclusion that we are not going to find easy evidence of God's favour (or lack of it) in such disaster indicators. Neither is it going to be particularly helpful in looking at the individual cases. We remember, as I noted in the pew sheet this morning, the story about the man born blind finding healing from the Lord. The prior question being asked was who sinned, this man or his parents? Someone must be responsible. Bad things do not happen to good people do they? If something bad does happen then where might the responsibility and accountability be found? 'What did I do to deserve this?', is the ringing cry. There probably is not one of us in this church today who does not recognise this issue.
So-called Christian leaders in some traditions at least will be asserting come every catastrophe, that the victims have for some reason earned or deserved their fate and that this is God at work. That is one answer, unacceptable to most of us. There are other painful facts to take in to account: the shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates where lots of humans live for instance or indeed the consideration of larger world scale questions such as the distribution of food or resources for a starter. A reflective discussion on issues such as these could find itself moving along such lines.
So already we have moved a long way from a simple enough question or two about a couple of small local events in Jerusalem that had just happened. It is good to take the opportunity, as and when it arises, to talk through such things, to pray them through, to become more familiar by way of more familiarity with the Scriptures as a whole, in a way that can help our faith connect with the way we live and then have our faith inform our responses when these difficult and terrible things happen — which they will.
We have considered just two issues that we might go digging much deeper in the resources that are in the Scriptures to reflect upon — the environment and the question of what might it mean when bad things happen. So far as the second, which was raised in the gospel this morning, I make the observation that having an idea of a God who is either indifferent to random suffering or quite focussed in vengeance and retribution is not the overwhelming witness and emphasis of the Scriptures and most particularly not to be found in the redemptive and atoning journey of the one whose death and resurrection we are preparing to celebrate. Next week's Lent 4 gospel focus on the parable of the Prodigal Son will only underline this central understanding of Jesus and his teachings even further.
Reflective engagement with the Scriptures is one of the central tasks we are called to. We have considered a couple of possible examples today. The resources are rich. Sunday by Sunday can offer us a start.
The Lord be with you.
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