In Your Ears

Luke 4:11ff

We live in a world of words. Words come at us from every quarter, the radio, tv, conversations, advertising hoardings and more. We constantly have to make choices about what words we listen to, what words we respond and how to decide which words are worth our effort and which are not.

Human beings are wordy people. We write books, songs, poetry and propaganda. We believe intrinsically in the power of words. We use words to say I love you, I hate you , I don’t believe you and what’s for dinner; often without taking a breath. We pay millions of dollars each year to copy writers, advertising gurus and spin doctors to find the right words to entice, cajole and bully others into doing, buying or following what ever is the most expedient for us.

We use words to labels others, to excuse behaviours to convince others of the rightness of policies, programs and lies. We use words to designate who is in and who is out, who is acceptable and who is not and who are the reason for the situation we find ourselves in.

We understand that words do more than simply communicate an idea, that words are in fact the most powerful tool we have at our disposal. Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating were great orators who knew the power of the word to make a case for an idea, an idea that generated response and action. Powerful men, powerful words.

We may have once said ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names (words) will never hurt me’ but we now know this for the lie it was. Words hurt and words inflict, encourage, and incite harm beyond imagination.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie wrote in his Orders to Soldiers in 1816, ‘All Aborigines from Sydney onwards are to be mace prisoners of war and if they resist they are to be shot and their bodies hung from trees in the most conspicuous places near where they fall, so as to strike terror into the hearts of surviving natives.’ The consequences of that statement were felt across the colony up to the late 1800s.

Today we have refugees who arrive by boat labelled as illegal and placed in offshore detention (prison) camps for a decade, and in some cases more without recourse to the legal system, work or appropriate living conditions.

Words are not neutral and call from us the best and the worst, dependent upon who is using them, how they are used and what they are used for. Spend a week watching the commercial tv news and scan the transcript of the words used to introduce and describe each news story. You will be surprised at what you hear.

In today’s Gospel, those gathered in the synagogue, the house of meeting, were surprised by the words they heard, spoken by the living word of God – Jesus. Jesus was the word God spoke into the world to act out of the mystery of the Godhead. The idea of Jesus as the word is made clear to us by John in the prologue to his Gospel – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” Jesus was the creative word spoken at the beginning of all creation and as spoken word, was a verb, the word that brings action, doing, into life.

For those who read the Jewish scriptures there was no separation between the word and action. One was the result of the other. One called the other into being. Without a word, a saying, a name, nothing existed or would exist. There is no tree or variety of tree until we give it a name. There is no individual person until we have a name to call him or her. There is no emotion until we have a created a name for it.

Luke has Jesus introduce God’s mission plan, naming it very clearly and laying it baldly before his audience. The idea of God’s preference for the poor is based heavily on tis text. Yet it is not simply a statement of what has long been known by his listeners, the text he uses was one used by Isaiah many centuries before and would have been know by those listening. They would have nodded agreement and muttered their approval of the text of the day. They had heard it before as the readings from the Jewish scriptures were akin to our lectionary, following seasons and festivals with readings appropriate for each.

What surprised the listeners were the words he used just before he sat down. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Or more literally ‘in your ears” and therefore in your knowing and acting.

It has been suggested that the text, written in the past tense, refers to something that has being and is to continue to have being. In other words, this has happened, it is not wishful thinking it is real, then, now and eternally. And you, having heard this are obligated to ensure it occurs. You have heard the word, you are give life to it, bring it into being, making real the words you have heard.

You and I are obligated to make real now what has already happened in the eternal scheme of things. What is real in the spiritual is to be real in the material.

No wonder they asked who he was and imply, how dare he impose such obligations on us? They began to look for reasons to sidestep their responsibilities, something Jesus returns to often in his dialogue with the religious leaders.

We live in a world where, according to recent Oxfam report, 61 people have between wealth equal to that of 50% of the world’s population or 3.7billion people. In 2013 there were 10.2 million people in prison with almost half in USA, Russia and China. In the last major study on homeless there were 100 million people homeless worldwide. Another study suggests that 35% of women worldwide suffer some form of domestic violence. Some 168 million children are caught up in child labour, over half of them in hazardous work.

It appears we are slow to put the word into action. Yet we are not exempt from the obligation to do so. As a result of hearing the will of God for the world it is up to us to make it real, as a nation, a church and individually.

How do we do this?

• ·      By being conscious of how we use words and labels to describe others, are we adding to the violence by the way we speak?
• ·      By critiquing the words we hear used in the media, by politicians and those who wish to control our actions and rejecting any language designed to coerce, manipulate or appeal to our baser emotions.
• ·    By being aware of words that appear rational and reasonable which are used to incarcerate, marginalise and enslave others such as progress, development, economies of scale and more.
• ·      By supporting words that are life giving and empowering such as rights, opportunities and respect for the dignity and life of each of God’s created words (creation) in the world.

These are broad suggestions. The task we share with Jesus is to discern the practical ways in which we can make them real. Jesus did it through obedience, dialogue, respect and experience.

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Go and make it real. Amen.

The Baptism of Jesus

Luke 3:21-22

 

Question: have you ever had the experience of listening to great music or looking at a painting and discovering you are no longer listening or looking at something out there, separate from you, but somehow, in some way you have become one with the sound, the image and the performer? So much so that for a brief moment whom you thought you were has become lost to you and you are completely enfolded within the experience. You are the music, the painting, the performer and they are you. There is no distinction. This is no longer about you are as a solitary human being, you are subsumed into the totality of being.

 

Todays Gospel reading introduces humanity to such an experience, not as the sole possession of Jesus, a special interaction between Jesus and God, but the very reality of our own existence.

 

William Loader suggests that "In a world of above and below, above and below meet in Jesus." I suggest not as the sole possession of Jesus but as the exemplar of an experience that is normative for you and I. Some see Jesus' baptism as the public connecting of God and Jesus, as a way of saying clearly who Jesus is and therefore setting him apart from the rest of humanity.

 

It is interesting that Luke situates the experience with the following words, ‘²¹Now when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus also had been baptised..’ This was not a private experience. It happened as the culmination of the baptism of all present. In some mystical way all present are therefore gathered up in the generosity of God who gives herself fully to Jesus. By association through presence and act all there are included in the proclamation God makes to Jesus.

 

How can this be? Jesus is Gods' son. They are human beings who came for repentance. We are ordinary human beings and therefore can not, by definition, be included in these words.

 

The truth is this: Jesus is God born into human form, material, physical, real and touchable, not in any way unlike us. Gods statement, ‘“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” could be rephrased as ‘You are my person, my fully alive human being, with who I am well pleased’.

 

What Jesus experiences at his baptism, he experiences on behalf and clearly articulates what has happened to all who has been baptised – God has generously flowed out of the Godhead into humanity in such a way that the two have become one – God has become, or is,  the ground of being for every human being. Meister Eckhart, the 14^th century mystic and teacher tells us that, 'You should know that God must act and pour Himself into the moment He finds you ready.' [German sermon 4, trans M.O’C. Walshe]

 

Edward Markquart, suggests that this happens at our baptism. He writes: "In our baptism, similar things happen to us as happened to Jesus when he was baptised: 1) The Spirit of God comes into us and remains in us. 2) We are declared to be a child of God. 3) We hear that God is well pleased with us."

 

Thomas Merton, in his book The New Man, picks up this theme as follows:

For now I had entered into the everlasting movement of that gravitation which is the very life and spirit of God: God's own gravitation towards the depths of his own infinite nature, his goodness without end. And God, that center who is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, finding me, through incorporation with Christ, incorporated into this immense and tremendous and tremendous gravitational movement which is love, which is the Holy Spirit, loved me.

 

The mystical insight found with in the baptism of Jesus is this: we are more than our physicality and what we believe gives us concrete being and identity. We are more than the space and time in which we live. And we are often so preoccupied, attached to what we believe identifies us, our troubles, concerns, possessions, relationships and more, that we live a life time without actualising the gift God pours into every human being.

 

Jesus is the example of what is possible when we do. Jesus detaches himself from the concerns of this world and becomes one with the concerns of God, of love, right up to and including obedience unto death. This is the unity of God and person living life to its fullness, with neither holding anything back.

 

Merton writes, “We exist solely for this, to be the place He has chosen for His presence, His manifestation in the world, His epiphany.” Essential Writings, Cunningham) Yet we are unaware of this possibility for most of our existence, swallowed up by the sensuality of life and the propaganda of consumerism and worldly concerns, we sideline this experience as only belonging remarkable people, of which Jesus is the most remarkable.

 

The baptism of Jesus is the one-ing of God and man and the recognition that all is well with such an endeavour. For us, the people who share in Jesus baptism, Eckhart writes: 

‘People think God has only become a human being there – in his historical incarnation (at his birth) – but that is not so; for God is here – in this very place – just as much incarnate as in a human being long ago. And this is why God has become a human: that he might give birth to you as his only begotten son/daughter, and as no less.’

 

This is the epiphany in the baptism, the moment when Jesus recognises and is filled with the identity of God and holds this experience out to all who share his baptism. We do not know how many others were there with Jesus, yet , mystically, they were all included in and shared in Jesus awakening to his or humanities oneness with God. This gift is given to us all and as we achieve detachment from space and time we begin to live the eternal life which is ours already.

 

I will allow Merton to close our meditation on Jesus Baptism in the following words:

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing.  It is only given.  But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”