Let me start by drawing out some important points from the
story of the raising of the widow’s son in Nain.
Widow’s were amongst the most vulnerable people in Jewish
society in the first century. Along with orphans they were a shorthand way of describing
someone in absolute dire need. In her
society, without a husband her son would be her provider and protector, and
with him dead her state was parlous, and faced probable destitution.
This parable then sees Jesus as the embodiment of God
answering or meeting a great need. Note also that nobody asks Jesus to act, and
no one declares any faith. But God, and
the transformative nature of God’s presence is “in” the situation and makes a
difference.
Jesus wasn’t the first person in the Bible said to have
raised people from the dead of course. In fact in the old testament the
prophets Elijah and Elijah both raise the dead children of widows (1 & 2
Kings) parables saying exactly the same thing – that God’s presence meets dire
need and can have a transformative effect.
The very nature of God is to bring life out of death both
symbolically and literally, both within
our mortal lives and beyond our mortal
existence.
As a premium example of someone being brought from spiritual
death to spiritual life within his
mortal life, St. Paul recounts his own experience in his letter to the
Galatians.
He writes of his own experience of being an active opponent
of the church and having a profound spiritual experience on the road to
Damascus that transformed his life. We
can easily forget that St. Paul never knew Jesus and has no knowledge or very
little direct knowledge of Jesus’ life and ministry which is why you find no
references to Jesus’ life or sayings in any of Paul’s letters.
All he would have had to go on was his meeting with Peter
and James in Jerusalem after disappearing to Arabia for three years after his
conversion experience. In our translation, after his sojourn in the desert it
said that he “visited” Peter, but apparently the English word doesn’t do
Justice to the Greek. It was more of a private consultation where there would
have been an exchange of views and Peter would doubtless have also furnished
Paul with some basic information on what Jesus was actually like in life.
Paul’s “knowing” of the
Spirit of God in Jesus wasn’t based on a personal flesh and blood encounter, it
was based on a spiritual encounter –
a spiritual encounter that Paul himself puts on the same level as the post
resurrection encounters of the twelve apostles by the way. That encounter
resulted in a re-orientation of Paul’s mind and Spirit that we call
metanoia - but a more common word would
be a transformation.
So for us, the template for transformation is Paul rather
than the disciples. We, like St. Paul, never knew Jesus, but the possibility of
God taking our lives and making them more productive and fruitful based on a
spiritual encounter, or a series of spiritual encounters - a deeper knowing of
God - is exactly the same for us as for
Paul. (And actually exactly the same as
it was for Jesus!)
I noted in my mid week letter that both Paul and Jesus took
time to discern what their encounters meant. Both took a long time in the
desert or wilderness, which you can take metaphorically or literally to think
and contemplate and work out what this encounter really meant for them.
We are the same. Whatever inner compulsion you have for
going to church, whatever experience of the nebulous you have ever had,
whatever nagging questions you have ever had about your life and place in the
cosmos – we need to honestly lay those questions out in front of us to allow us
to think about them in the context of a Spiritual reality we call God and trust
that in following that light however dim it might sometimes feel, we might
discern his presence with us and trust that we are heading in the right
direction and are heading towards our goal – which is also God.
A little further on you may also discern that this journey
is actually one of self realisation. In coming to know God you come to know
yourself and likewise, in getting to know who you really are in the core of
your being, you come to know God. I am reminded of the old lliturgical greeting..
Come near to God and he will come near to you.
This comes from the letter of James and seems to encapsulate
what I am trying to say. Of course James, Jesus’ brother, was the other person
Paul names as meeting in Jerusalem. James is yet another example of Spiritual
life out of death. Jesus’ family were against him in his life but came to a new
understanding of his brother’s life and message after he had died. And so,
because of his provenance as Jesus’ brother it was James rather than any of the
disciples that came to pre-eminence in the early church in Jerusalem. James
writes of an internal Spiritual transaction;
Come near to God and he will come near to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment