Christian Art | Meditations On The Love Of Jesus Christ | Lost Sheep Of Israel
Matthew 9: 35 | King James Audio Bible | Saturday, Advent Week 1
35 And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people.
36 ¶ But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.
37 Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few;
38 Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.
1 AND when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease.
6 But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
7 And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
8 Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.
Today’s Bible verses, as per the Roman lectionary, notably elide Matthew 10: 5: ‘Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not.’ This omission is curious, though understandable: during the Mass especially, we are to contemplate inclusion rather than exclusion, and the intentions behind Jesus’ initial injunctions to those he sends to preach might well require explanation. Jesus, then, tells his missionary disciples: you are sent now to preach to the Jews alone, not to Gentiles, not to Samaritans, but to Jews alone.
There are, now, those who say that Jesus came to preach to the Jews alone, that his way was orthodox Jewish, and that he would be amazed that his teaching should be taken to the Gentiles. These are people who say that the Gospels, our record of the life of Jesus, have been changed to fit in with a Gentile Christianity. Such people tend to say that the Gospels have been edited and rewritten in the light of St Paul. (Incidentally, they point to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 as sealing the fate of a rival and exclusively Jewish Christianity, based there and led, as it is said, by James.)
It may be a good thing to encounter such theories, and then to read and listen to the Gospels again, and so thereby to encounter much more powerfully Christ’s true majesty.
Now, still, we hear that we are not to cast our ‘pearls before swine’ or to give the divine food of the elect ‘to the dogs’, and such injunctions once more demand that we engage ever more closely with Christ the God-man, to come up close to him as if we are there in the moment of utterance, so that we vibrate with objections and questions and outright desires and needs while Jesus speaks and we resonate to his words, right here, right now.
In the very person of Christ, and in these Gospel verses, we sense the sheer intensity of the drama of repentance, forgiveness and salvation. The Jewish people were first called. So many refused that call. And so then the Gentiles also are called to fill the places at the wedding banquet. The whole world is called! We are all called! We can be confident of this great calling for all time.
The Gospels, though, are not a neat summary account of this calling. Christ’s life is 100% human as well as 100% divine. And human life is messy. It is changeable, conflicted, packed with human drama. Christ’s human life reflects the many, many conflicts affecting the lives of all surrounding him, including the incredible tension between Jews and Gentiles.
In his missionary work, Christ teaches love and tolerance. He heals all who come to him, Gentile and Jew alike. Finally, it is through the ultimate sacrifice, through the cross, that Christ cuts through all internecine conflicts once and for all, and so definitively heals us.
‘The hope of truth and freedom is already ours, dearly beloved, but if we are to attain truth and freedom in reality we must endure and persevere. The very fact that we are Christians is the substance of faith and hope. But in order that faith and hope may attain their full fruit, there is need of patience.’ St Cyprian
King James Audio Bible | KJV | King James Version
Concluding Prayer
Lord, to free man from his sinful stae
you sent your only Son into this world.
Grant to us who in faith and love wait for his coming
your gift of grace
and the reward of true freedom.
We make our prayer through our Lord.
This poem challenges the convention that poetry must rely on embellishment, elaborate imagery, or artifice to be meaningful or beautiful. Herbert begins with rhetorical questions that critique the idea that only fiction or outward, artificial beauty can be the subjects of verse: ‘Who says that fictions only and false hair / Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?’ This opening begins the thought of Herbert’s argument that truth and simplicity have their inherent worth in poetry [ … ]
Sometimes, when I read my Bible, I pause in the reading and say to myself: ‘This bit’s real.’ It would be fair to say, I have issues with Mary, because, contrary to what we are taught to say, Mary isn’t my mother. Rather: Mum is. One bit of the Bible-text says this: And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, “He is beside himself.” … And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting about him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mark 3: 21; 31-35.) Here she comes. She is in considerable distress. I can imagine that. I can relate to that. To save her boy from whatever he’s got himself into this time. And you’re not telling me there isn’t something inside that. Her boy is beside himself. Radical. Radicalized. Radicalizing. A misunderstood word. /ˈradɪk(ə)l/ adjective & noun. 1 Forming the root, basis, or foundation; original, primary. 2a Inherent in the nature of a thing or person; fundamental. b Of action, change, an idea: going to the root or origin; far-reaching, thorough. c Advocating thorough or far-reaching change. d Characterized by departure from tradition; progressive; unorthodox. ‘He has a demon! And he is mad!’ – thus ‘the Jews’. (e.g. John 10: 20.) Come home! It’s all she wants. His family want him back now. But it is an exclusive cult: there is an inside and there is an outside; and on the outside, they are not meant to understand, lest they be converted. He has defined himself as different from anything she was. Only at the end does Jesus say to his Mum – and with savage, bitter irony: ‘Woman, behold your son.’ And then he dies. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. We ask that we might find Mary in our hearts as a Yes! place for Jesus. It is also recommended that we pray to Jesus that we may be further in oneness with Mary. It is self-emptying, such that we only exist insofar as we are responsive to God’s Word. * Last term, and put-out to pasture, the old Archbishop Emeritus came over to stay for a few days and did the odd class with us. He spoke of Yes! as the meaning of Mary’s virginity. And we were not very nice about him. One or two took umbrage. One or two got the hump. In a sense, his Grace, the Arch, basically wanted to move anyone he’d ever known from a high-place – a mountain – received theological ‘truth’ – to an imminent, human plane. Earthing the spiritual. Recalibrating metrics of life’s believability toward a spiritual sense of things. He might have asked the impermissible question: what happened? His Grace described it. God’s love as a cloud. This descended upon Mary – and subsumed her. Within the cloud, Mary capitulated utterly. She became only and purely a response to God’s love. As he spoke, the Arch cradled her. He carried her in his lap – in his hands. His Grace was a consecrated bishop. He was faith. He sat squat, a rounded man, hands cupped and ankles crossed, fingers interlocked, with parted thighs. Rumpled, washed, speckled. A lifetime’s skin… There could be no doubt His Grace spoke through long-term personal relationship with Mary. It was Julian went for him: ‘So are you saying Mary was a Virgin? Or are you not saying Mary was a Virgin?’ Nasty. No, it wasn’t pretty. Julian twisting his silver ring. For a moment, what Julian had said to the Arch simply failed to communicate. No, for a moment, that dumped on the air meant nothing. Then His Grace said: ‘There is a range of possible meanings we may understand in the question of Mary’s virginity. For example, there are understandings of the word virginity entailed in the action of giving birth.’ Julian said: ‘Duh! So had she had sex or hadn’t she?’ Trigger words. No, it wasn’t pretty. On that went for a little while. At length, Julian’s point seemed reluctantly conceded. Then the Arch told us a new story, an additionally human event, the more to baffle us. Controversially, he told us that Mary could not have been Joseph’s first wife, for this would not have been the way of things in the society of that time. His belief was that Joseph must have taken Mary into his household through pity. That would be normal, he said, for Joseph to bring a young, vulnerable girl, who is about to have a baby, within his protection, not meaning to enjoy with her marital relations, but through kindness. ‘And this story of the inn and stable,’ the Archbishop said, ‘it can’t have been like that really. Joseph has travelled with Mary to stay with his family, at home in Bethlehem, and they don’t want Mary in their house, for reasons which I am sure we can understand. It must have been there was considerable resistance to Mary. But Mary gives birth, and who can resist a baby? That’s what happened. It must have been. ‘I’m convinced that must have been how it happened really.’ Later that term, toward the beginning of Advent, we met boys who had been here before, in Valladolid, and now were in regular seminary. They had heard and recited verbatim all the Archbishop had said to them. Their spot-on impressions of each of the fathers were scathing. […]
In these Bible verses, Jesus begins his farewell to his disciples, and the chapter closes with the words: ‘Rise, let us go hence.’ The natural continuation would then be the verse which opens chapter 18: ‘When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples over the brook Cedron, where was a garden, into the which he entered, and his disciples.’ However, Jesus continues to teach his disciples through chapters 15 to 17. We are aware, then, of the rearrangements which seem to have taken place as John composed his Gospel [ … ]
