Thought for the Week - 17th December 2023

 

Dear Friends, 

In his book ‘Preparing for Christmas – Daily Meditations for Advent’, the Franciscan priest and founder of the Centre for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Richard Rohr, reflects on the genealogy of Jesus at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, and what he calls ‘the amazing thing of the deliberate inclusion of four foreign, non-Jewish women, of whom at least three were of easy virtue, or even public “sinners”’. In a piece entitled, ‘The Authority of Those Who have Suffered’, Rohr wonders why the gospel would risk such characters appearing in the list, concluding that ‘it clearly wanted to say that Jesus came from the ordinary, the human, the broken, the sinful suffering world, as all of us do. His birth accepted the full human condition, which becomes his first step toward the cross’. For Jesus, his authority is found in ‘the authenticity of his message and because of the transformative power of his journey through death to resurrection’. Later in Matthew’s gospel we read of the occasion when the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came and asked Jesus to let her sons sit at his right and left in his kingdom, and Jesus replied that they didn’t know what they were asking of him, saying, ‘Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?’ (Matthew 20:22). The point of this story is that the mother and sons of Zebedee had failed to understand the ‘cup’ of suffering that they must face before living in the glory of God’s kingdom. Rohr says that ‘spiritually speaking, authority comes from passing through trial and darkness and coming out the other side even more free, happy, alive and contagious! Transformed people transform people (Rohr, 66). And that is what we are called to today, to live transformed lives because of the presence of Christ in our lives, so that others might see and wonder at what it is that lives in us – even as we battle our own struggles and trials and darknesses in life – that as we come out of them, we can rejoice and give thanks to God for his love and forgiveness, mercy and grace.                                                           

Grace and peace,

Neil

A Prayer from the Psalms

I cry to you, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.’

Listen to my cry, for I am in desperate need; rescue me from those who pursue me,

for they are too strong for me. Set me free from my prison, that I may praise your name.

Then the righteous will gather about me because of your goodness to me.

Psalm 142:5-7

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