DAVID’S RESTRAINT

 

DAVID’S RESTRAINT

David’s restraint, when he has Saul in his power, is a model for peacemakers. Saul set out with three thousand men to find and do away with David. David, aware of Paul’s aim, creeps up on Saul while he is asleep and takes away his spear but does not harm him. When Saul wakes and realises what had happened, he cries out, ‘I have behaved like a fool. I have been profoundly in the wrong.’

This incident from the Hebrew scriptures prepares us for the gospel where Jesus says bluntly, ‘love your enemies, do good to those who hate you’. As many have pointed out, a shocking command to Jews then under the Roman yoke. To love is to go out to another with a desire they be free and full of joy. The story is told of Aston Chichester, before he became the first Catholic bishop in Harare, that he accused a boy at a school in England of helping himself to the altar wine. The boy feared the worst when he was called to the office but Chichester had investigated and found the boy was innocent. He told him, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve made a fool of myself.’ History doesn’t tell us what the boy thought of this but he surely went away amazed and elated.  

The desire to respond to other’s fears and build bridges does not seem prominent in the mindset of many world leaders. Rather than removing the spear they use it to impose their own solution. After all these centuries of war and oppression, we still seem far from practising restraint. To take just one example, why is it not obvious that the Palestinians want a place where they can live and prosper without fear? Why is this denied them these past eighty years?

Restraint brings peace to both sides. To compromise is not to show weakness. On the contrary, it takes courage to face the cost of another’s fears and allay them. I come from a country, still divided, but where efforts to remove the bitter hatred of three centuries has succeeded to the extent that young people hardly know what you are talking about when you recall the wounds of the past. To reach that point both sides had to restrain themselves and recognise their antagonisms were leading nowhere.

To see a problem from the point of view of the other person, to get into their mind, is what actors, psychotherapists, priests and many others try to do. Somehow, we have to empty ourselves of our own standpoints and take on that of another. Isn’t that what the Lord himself did when he became one of us? 

23 February 2025  Sunday 7 C  1 Sam 26    1 Cor 15: 45-49        Lk 627-38

PLANTED BY THE WATERSIDE

 

PLANTED BY THE WATERSIDE

What makes for a good doctor, or a good anyone? The doctor who knows the clinical answer to every disease will, no doubt, do a good job. But if they only rely on book knowledge, there will be something missing. That ‘something’ is the space between the doctor as a person and the patient. The book knowledge is necessary and may well provide a cure for many ailments. But it is not enough.

I have mentioned before in this column the etching I once saw in a house in Ireland where a child lay on a bed dying. The mother has her head buried in despair in the bedclothes, the father standing lost in the background and the doctor sitting by the bed deep in thought. He is straining every inch of his knowledge and his intuition to find a remedy.

Scientists today are humbler than their forbears. There was a time, in the hubris of the Enlightenment, when they boasted they would, in time, find the answer to all nature’s secrets. Few would claim that today. The more science advances, the more scientists know their limits – and the more some of the gospel sayings show their wisdom; “When you have done all you were told to do, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty'” (Lk 17:10).

But still, scientists, like doctors, explore beyond known boundaries and follow their intuitions. They leave aside rule books, manuals and maps and search for solutions that may never have been tried before. They will not go wrong if they remember another scripture saying, this time from Jeremiah; ‘Blessed is the one who trusts in Yahweh ... They are like a tree by the waterside ... which never stops bearing fruit’ (17:7).    

I take this to mean, when a person is rooted in God, they can try all sorts of things. They will never go far wrong. Am I saying anything profound? No! We know that no soldier can be trained for every eventuality in war and no player can prepare for every twist of a football game. True, but we are not soldiers or footballers – most of us. The point surely is; we are all called to be explorers, all called to announce the kingdom of God wherever we are planted.

The tree has no choice, but we have. We can choose to be planted by the waterside and ‘thrust our roots to the stream’ (Jer 17 again). There we draw water that gives us energy and imagination to engage in the struggles of today. Alone, we can do nothing. But rooted by the water’s edge we can make a difference – beyond the rules. 16 Feb 2025. Sunday 6 C. Jer 17:5-8. 1 Cor 15:12... 20. Lk 6: 17... 26

  

     

AMONG YOU, UNKNOWN TO YOU

 

AMONG YOU, UNKNOWN TO YOU

The story is told by Indian wise man, Anthony de Melo. about a religious community that was disintegrating. They were aging and bickering and had lost direction. The leader of the group decided to consult a holy man and ask his advice. He simply said, ‘Do you not know the Messiah is among you?’ The leader was puzzled and went back to the community and reported the holy man’s words.

They did not understand but they began to look at one another and say, ‘Could this one be the Messiah? Or that one? Or even that one?’ They began to see each other differently and began to respect each other, a respect that gradually grew into a warmth. Soon the community turned a corner and became wholesome again and attracted others to join them.

We have no idea who this person is we meet today. When I was at our Social Development Centre in Chishawasha, we use to have members of the boards of organisations we dealt with coming to see what we were doing. I well remember the time Robert MacNamara was one such. I was in awe of the man who had been President John F. Kennedy’s Defence Secretary at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. For about a week the world was on the edge of a nuclear war that might have destroyed us all. And here he was calmly bumping along a Mhondoro dirt road looking at our projects.  I was the only one on the bus who knew who he was. I was totally in awe of the man and could hardly put a few sentences together in talking to him. 

In this first week of February we definitively end the Christmas season which has lasted forty days, as Lent and Easter will shortly do. The occasion is the ‘presentation’ of the baby Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem. No one, in that milling crowd, knew who this child was – except two old representatives of the ‘remnant’ of Israel, Simeon and Anna. The promises to Abraham, the covenant on Sinai and the words of the prophets are being fulfilled but no one notices.

Our world may look predictable and – for many of us – our lives secure. But we live in a charged world where those we meet – from the greatest to the least – may be about to change everything. John the Baptist told the pharisees ‘standing among you, unknown to you, is the one ... and I am not fit to undo the strap of his sandals’. Whoever and whatever we meet on our way, we are invited to stop and pay attention. Otherwise we may miss something that may change our life and that of those among whom we live.

9 February 2025    Sunday 5 C           Is 6:1...8      1 Cor 15:1-11       Lk 5:1-11

NO END IN SIGHT

 

NO END IN SIGHT

I was five years old and remember talk of the end of the Japanese war that year, 1945, but if there was mention of the liberation of the death camp in Southern Poland, I knew nothing of it. And many to this day do not know of the systematic killing of millions of people, mostly Jews, by the Nazis in the terrible war of that period. Perhaps that is why such publicity has been given this week to the discovery, by Russian soldiers, of the many emaciated people awaiting death in Auschwitz eighty years ago.

The Northern Irish reporter, on a recent visit to the camp, was close to tears as he showed us the ordinary looking railway lines that carried millions to their death, the block houses and the gas chambers. How could human beings devise a complex efficient system of deliberately killing millions of people? Even after eighty years it still sounds unbelievable.

And eighty years later, we are in the midst of the long-drawn-out re-assertion the Jewish people have been pushing ever since that terrible time. With international backing, they carved out a foothold in Arab lands without the agreement of the people who had lived there for centuries. The result was tension, violence and war. The Holy Land is now an armed camp with both peoples locked in a bitter struggle with no end in sight. Thousands have been killed, homes destroyed and lives of survivors blunted forever. This week has seen a truce given joy to a few on both sides but no sign of a lasting peace.

Also this week, we commemorate another event involving Jews. Following custom, every first born male Jewish child was brought to Jerusalem and ‘presented to the Lord.’ So Mary and Joseph took the child Jesus up to the temple and ‘offered in sacrifice a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.’

Is there any connection between these events? Jewish history was supposed to be about hope. Abraham was the father of a movement that would see his descendants as numerous as the sand on the sea shore – impossible to count. The child who suddenly appeared in the temple was the fulfilment of the longed-for promise, a pilot project that would multiply and create a new world where everyone would be a new born son and daughter. A light would appear in the darkness and each would look at their neighbour and say, ‘brother, sister’.

It hasn’t happened – yet. Paul’s ‘sorrow and unceasing anguish’ because ‘my brothers – my own flesh and blood ... have not recognised God’s saving justice and have tried to establish their own’ remains.

2 February 2025   The Presentation     Mal 3:1-4    Heb 2:14-18    Lk 2:22-40

THE WORD

 

THE WORD

When I went to Mhondoro to learn Shona many years ago, I was astonished how much people enjoyed talking to one another. I saw two people approach each another on a path and they started talking before they met. They stood for a while talking and then moved off in their different directions still talking until they were out of earshot.

People could listen to Jesus for hours, even days – ‘these people have been with me for three days’ (Mark 8:2) – and not get tired. The early church circulated his teaching by word of mouth but as time went on, and those who listened to Jesus began to die, they decided they must write down his words and deeds. We have all benefited from this.

This week our readings record Jesus himself relying on the written word - from Isaiah. The first reading tells us of the return from exile when, frankly, most people had forgotten their own history and the promises God made to them in the desert. So when Ezra found the book of the law and read it to the people ‘from early morning until noon’ they ‘were all in tears as they listened.’

When Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah – ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me ... to proclaim liberty to captives ... and the Lord’s year of favour’, his hearers in Nazareth were astonished and ‘he won the approval of all.’

And now it is our turn to draw life from the written word. We are celebrating Sunday of the Word of God and it is a moment to remember what a rich treasure we have in the bible. It contains in written form the whole story of God’s gradual revelation of his purpose to the human family. The church has instinctively preserved the early texts through centuries of war, fire and floods. The original languages were put into Latin in the fourth century and, in modern times, in every language under the sun.

In the days before books, the monasteries developed the practice of lectio divina, holy reading, by which a person was invited to ponder, relish and express their thoughts in personal prayer. There would be lots of pauses in the reading to allow the meaning to sink in like water on arid soil.

This is accessible prayer for us all. But we can also realise, in our secular age, that the written word by any good writer can also convey a message to us. We can be nourished by the words of Shakespeare and also Chinua Achebe or Charles Mungoshi.  If we ‘listen’ attentively, the written word can be a partner to us in a dialogue about our world.

26 January 2025           Sunday 3 C                  Neh 8:2...10       1 Co 12:12-30            Lk 4:14-21

 

THERE ARE ALWAYS CONSEQUENCES

 

THERE ARE ALWAYS CONSEQUENCES

As Christmas disappears into our rear-view mirror, we are invited to begin the new year by listening to the letter to the Hebrews which is a meditation on what Jesus did. ‘He has purged sins away’ (1:3). I find myself asking how did he do it. From our earliest years we learn that Jesus ‘died for our sins.’ But what does that mean? How did that help us?

Well, one answer must surely be that he took responsibility for sin despite the fact that he was sinless. I remember as a small boy we were all herded into a classroom and the teacher announced no one was leaving the room until the one who had committed some crime owned up to being the culprit. He didn’t and we were kept in that room a long time. But I have since fantasised, ‘what if I had owned up, even though I was not guilty’?  I would have enabled the others to go free though I might have brought some punishment on myself.

They would have gone free but that might not have solved whatever the issue was. There are always consequences. Many innocent people bore the cost of the liberation of Zimbabwe. We attained freedom through their sacrifice. But that does not mean the root causes for the conflict were wiped away in a day. The consequences remain.

We have to work through the consequences. Even though we might say we were not responsible for ‘the system’ that existed in Southern Rhodesia, we have to engage in a new struggle to remove the ‘sin that clings’ to quote Hebrews again (12:1). What Jesus has done is clear the ground so that it is much easier for us than it was for our ancestors to build a just society which reflects the ‘hidden purpose of God’.

We can do this, first, by accepting our responsibility and becoming engaged in this building. Second, by enduring the consequences of failure when we have done all that we can – even if it means the cross. Edmund Campion tried to engage with Eizabeth I of England in 1581, in the days of persecution with these words:

If these my offers be refused, and my endeavours can take no place, and I, having run thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour, I have no more to say but to commend your case and mine to almighty God, the searcher of hearts, who sends us his grace, and sets us at accord before the day of payment, to the end that we may be at last friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.

19 January 2025    Sunday 2 C           Is 62:1-5     1 Cor 12:4-11       Jn 2:1-11

O KEY OF DAVID!

 

O KEY OF DAVID!

‘O key of David ...what you open no one else can close.’ So sings the church at evening prayer on 20 December. God comes to dwell among us and open up the store of energy locked away until ‘the time is fulfilled.’ The time is now fulfilled. This is the time. That is why we rejoice. No one knew, until modern times, the energy locked away in the oil under the ground. Nor did anyone guess we could produce electric power to generate light and heat.

These are images, parables, of the energy locked away in each of us – waiting to be released. The coming of the Word of God, Jesus of Nazareth, the key of David, releases energy on the world. We have only to think of Saul of Tarsus, locked up in his Jewish zeal for the law, frustrated it wasn’t leading anywhere. Then he is overcome by whatever it was that happened to him at Damascus. It was like releasing a pent-up spring. He taught, he preached, he travelled, he wrote and he suffered.

His influence and that of his companions spread everywhere, transforming late antiquity so that within a few centuries, the key was unlocking doors until the desert and the sea put a temporary halt to their reach. Over subsequent centuries, the key of David reached the furthest lands.

The process continues but now it is a call, no longer to go further, but to go deeper. Each person has gifts, even the poorest and most disabled. But often they are unknown, hidden. As we celebrate Christmas, we can search, as the wise man from the East did, for this key to our own hearts and to our hidden gifts. And the key to the hearts and gifts of others. What is stopping us unearthing these treasures, ‘hidden in a field’, we carry around with us every day?

These are gifts, not for our own enjoyment – although that too - but to be shared. One who knows their gifts and can share them, transforms the world.   As we kneel in our imagination before the crib, it is a great sorrow if we cannot unwrap our gifts. Something prevents us. Our fear of failure or ridicule? Or our circumstances which block our freedom to be who we are. Jesus, the Key, stands there waiting to help us. That’s why he came.  He is creating a new heaven and a new earth. But he can’t do it without us.   

22 December 2024          Advent 4C   Mic 5:1-4    Heb 10:5-10       Lk 1:39-45