He will not waver

The clean slate of the new year has been rapidly spoilt by the Paris shootings and we remind ourselves those murders are just the ones that caught the world’s attention. There are countless others that go unnoticed. So we have landed with a bump once again in a year that begins to feel like the year just ended. So what’s new about 2015? Well, nothing noticeable so far, though some media have a way of telling us good news and hinting at the basic truth that the world is actually getting better year by year. One event can cheer us; the normalisation of relationships between the US and Cuba. For fifty years America has tried to isolate Cuba and cripple its economy. It has been counter-productive. It only made the Cuban authorities more hardened in their defiance of the Goliath next door. Now relations can begin to grow again. This is really good news and could have implications elsewhere, not least in the Middle East. Confrontation and violence, and we come back to the Paris killings, often leads to further confrontation and violence and a weary spiral develops that can take years to exhaust itself. But at some stage the two sides realise the pointlessness of it all and sit down to talk. Fidel Castro said in 2010, ‘the Cuban model no longer works even for us.’ And in Northern Ireland thirty years and nearly five thousand deaths after violence broke out in 1969, the two sides there finally sat down to work out an agreement that is steadily harvesting peace in a province charged with mutual mistrust for three hundred years. ‘Faithfully he brings true justice; he will neither waver nor be crushed until true justice is established on the earth.’ (Isaiah 42) Perhaps many persons do not see any particular energy behind the thrust towards peace and justice in our world beyond human longing and some kind of cosmic energy that keeps the world developing and evolving. And that is quite understandable and reasonable. Yet there is an energy; the energy of God’s spirit which groans together with our spirit in one great act of giving birth (Romans 8). This takes nothing from human effort and is in no way some kind of exterior force miraculously coming in to engineer human happiness. It is the stuff of humanity itself aching towards the divine. 11 January 2015 Feast of the Baptism of Jesus Isaiah 42:1-7 Acts 10:34-38 Mark 1:7-11