Rev elations

We put limits and boundaries in all of the roles that we as humans occupy. None of us can be everything to all people. In Matthew 15:21-28, we notice Jesus doing just that. He has a clear sense of what his purpose is and what it is not: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ’. This sort of role clarity we are surprised at in Jesus because we see him as our universal saviour. But at this point in our history and story Jesus is also a human prophet, and it is only progressively that it is revealed to us (and perhaps even to Jesus himself) that Jesus is to be so much more than a first century Jewish prophet. Within this context then Jesus’ refusal to respond to the woman’s request, makes limited historical sense. She is an outsider, a nameless non-Jewish woman. Jesus has no relationship to her and feels no sense of duty towards her. What is fascinating about this passage then is how this woman refuses to be dismissed and ignored by Jesus. Even though she knows...

St Paul is a man who experienced a seismic shift in his understanding of how God relates to His people and to him as an individual.  That shift in thinking is dramatised in the road to Damascus episode, which as a story has become synonymous with the experience of dramatic conversion. Paul provides us with a paradigmatic example of the effects of conversion on an individual. His passion for and evangelical zeal for his new found understanding is second to none. Yet with the advantage of hindsight we know that the division between Judaism and Christianity has led to some pretty awful consequences. Paul’s continuing comparison between what he used to believe and what he now believes necessarily casts the Jewish comprehension in an unfavourable light. So much of Christian history has been about casting the Jewish faith as one that has been superseded by the superior Christian one. What can we do about this? We can’t read Paul’s words innocently after the holocaust and we can’t speak...

Looking back helps us to see who we have become – and so it is as we look back to the start of the First World War. Britain was very different in its national character compared with today – a time however no less complex and demanding, despite our tendency to be nostalgic about the past – the political atmosphere in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was tense in 1914, Home Rule and the threat of civil war in Ireland along with the suffragette movement were urgent questions. As war was declared, almost without warning, despite the trepidation, no-one could have predicted how the First World War was to change the Western experience and consciousness. World War Poetry has become a part of our national imagination, with stark clarity it has spoken deeply to us of the suffering and sacrifice that war demands and exacts. For some of those men facing their own violent and brutal death and seeing it happen to their friends, comrades and enemies, the words of the Bible offer...