A man died and went to heaven. St Peter gave him a tour. They walked down a long hallway and came to a door. The man could hear a lot of laughter and much clinking of glasses and the pouring of wine.

“Who’s behind that door?” the man asked St Peter.

“Oh that’s the Anglicans”

They came to another door and the man hears singing, praises and loud gospel music. “That’s the Methodists” said St Peter.

They went further down the hall and just before they got there St Peter motioned to the man to be very quiet.

“Why?” whispered the man.

“Because” said St Peter, “that’s the Catholics, and they think they are the only ones up here!”

Well, of course you can substitute any religious group for the Catholics – though, given the pope’s recent pronouncement, it’s quite topical – and yet many religious groups believe they have an exclusive hold on the truth and that they are the only one’s suitable for heaven.

Today’s Gospel must therefore be quite a shock – because it suggests that God doesn’t exclusively favour any one group but rather – that all are included. I base this view on what are to me some of the most thrilling words of the entire Gospel:

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.

Now the first thing to note about that verse is that the Kingdom is a GIFT – we can’t do anything to get to it – we can only receive it as something God gives us freely.  Secondly, in giving it to us God gets immense pleasure.

We can relate to this because whenever we give a gift to someone freely, without strings attached, we also can get immense pleasure both in the giving and in seeing the delight on the face of the receiver.  You see, God really delights in us and wants to give us everything and it’s tremendously important to recognise this truth because it’s at the heart of the Gospel. The central truth is about God’s grace – the lavish, free gift of himself which is what the Love of God truly is.

The Good News of the Kingdom – the Gospel – is not about our being good – it’s about God being good to us.  Everything that God does in Jesus Christ is for our benefit, our well-being and our salvation.  So, when I read that it is God’s good pleasure to give me the Kingdom, I feel liberated and loved; wanted and cared for in the deepest way possible.  In the world we are often told how inadequate we are and people often concentrate on failure but there is, within God’s free love, a hope and a positive acceptance of us which is so mind-blowing that we scarce dare believe it – and yet that’s the truth of the Gospel.

When I was in Normandy last week, I went to the Abbaye Blanche where the Roman Catholic community there fosters art as an expression of religious belief – not just Christian belief but also as a meeting place between the differing world religions. Because there is a confidence in Christianity we can meet other faiths in a non-threatened way and it is often in art and music and literature that this can happen.

The Exhibition I saw was on the subject of the human condition. It was made up of two contrasting elements.  There were paintings by a Belgian artist, Marcel Hasquin which pulled no punches in showing the human condition in all its agony and pain. Disturbing images jumped out from the canvas reminding us that so often we humans create suffering for others and make it almost nigh impossible to celebrate life.  In an age when the world is full of nomadic people displaced from their homes and made insecure by despots, dictators, by human greed and selfishness, or the consequences of war which always catches out the innocent, we are all too familiar that for many the freedom of God’s love which liberates and allows us to celebrate life, is but a dream.

Even so-called natural disasters, such as the floods which have brought suffering to millions in Asia may truly be a consequence of our mis-use of the planet.  I have written in my Pondering in today’s Newsletter about the film I saw this week on Global Warming. Increasingly, many believe this to be a consequence of human greed which flies in the face of a Gospel that speaks of the solidarity of Jesus with the vulnerable and those who suffer injustice.  I quote those words from an important paper published by Christian Aid entitled All Creation Groaning which argues for a new understanding of human relationships where all are involved in the struggle to make our Earth a safe place - not just for this generation but for those still to come and for whom we are currently laying down a legacy of abuse of nature which may be a discomfort for us in the so-called advanced nations of the West but which for so many others spells total despair.

Without urgent action now we not only perpetuate injustice amongst the world’s vulnerable but we will hand on a legacy to the future which some would suggest will make this planet almost uninhabitable – as indeed it has already become for many non-human species of God’s creation.  Is that dark and unstable world what we want for our children and grandchildren?

And yet there is something else in the human condition which speaks of something different.  The other exhibitor at the Abbaye Blanche was a Sculptor, Harry Rosenthal whom I was privileged to meet at the exhibition. He escaped from Vienna before the second world war and moved to Milan. His name suggests that his ethnic origin was not welcome in Hitler’s Germanic empire and perhaps it is a reflection on the human condition of those times that inspired him to hope for something better.  His art is optimistic and, for me, so positive that it allowed me to dare to hope that, despite so much evidence to the contrary, there is a way forward which speaks of a world where humanity can aspire to the truth of the Gospel that all are free and loved because of God’s lavish gift of grace.

I think immediately of two contrasting works I saw in the exhibition:

One is of St. George destroying the dragon but not in the triumphal way we so often see this depicted in art. George is struggling from within the dragon which for me is a reminder that so often it is not outside forces we have to battle with but those things within ourselves which distort God’s image and which turn us away from the love of God and from allowing His love to rule our hearts.  Of course – that’s the battle we all have with sin but we do not battle alone. Harry Rosenthal chose St George to show the help we have in this struggle but he could so easily have replaced him with Christ – as indeed he does in some of his other works.

The second sculpture was of King David dancing before the Lord – a capricious figure celebrating life.  But how do we get from the human struggle to the human celebration?

First we need to recognise that despite everything, God is in our midst offering us, out of his good pleasure, the joy of his kingdom and the certainty that as Christ defeated evil and injustice on the Cross, so he can do so in all our lives. And secondly, by remembering that this gift is not for ourselves alone. It is offered to all. 

Two consequences follow from this:  The first is that whilst we know the truth of Christ, it is a work in progress in all of our lives. None of us completely possesses this truth in its totality. We are all on a journey of discovery and we all have so much to learn about God, about what Jesus came to show us of God’s nature, and about how the Holy Spirit can reveal that nature within our own lives.  The immediate effect of such realisation is that whilst we must be convinced and convincing about our faith, we cannot ever scorn the faith of others by insisting that our way of faith is the only way and those who do not share our view are somehow weaker or mistaken.  We do not have the right to judge the quality of another’s soul. We can only share our insights of God’s love and recognise it in others.

Too much that passes for evangelism is couched in terms of putting our stance of belief into others as if they had nothing of God already in them.  A cautionary tale then.

There was a missionary who was fervent and zealous in his belief and with a style of evangelism which was, to say the least, confrontational.

One day he applied himself fervently to the conversion of another who listened patiently until the evangelist ran out of steam. Then he said quietly:

“Thank you. I have been worshipping God all my life. Now you have told me his name.”

How easy it is to think that only we have the answers!

The second consequence of receiving God’s gift of the Kingdom with all its liberating love is that we need to struggle with those in the world who are vulnerable so that they too can be free and hope-filled.  If we truly are Kingdom people then we are to take seriously what our Lord told us about caring for the needy; feeding the poor; releasing those imprisoned in slavery of many different kinds; and befriending the alienated and the unloved.

The best story I can offer to illustrate what this means comes from the life of a Saint we celebrated on Friday – St Laurence, one of the Church’s early martyrs.  Laurence was a deacon in Rome, closely associated with Pope Sixtus the Second.  When Sixtus was put to death by the Roman Empire, soldiers came to the church and demanded that Laurence handed over the Church treasures. He did so immediately. He gathered the poor people from his neighbourhood and presented them to the soldiers with the words: “These are the treasures of the Church.”

As we celebrate the gift of God’s Kingdom and journey together towards its fulfilment in our lives – we too must take with us the treasures of the Church. Not as Jesus reminded us today, that treasure which thieves steal and moths corrupt , but the treasure of vulnerable humanity who, through our loving action and courageous fight for their justice, are carried by us towards that joyful hope of the Kingdom which is both ours and theirs because God does not discriminate. His salvation, grace and unconditional love is given to all.  Planet earth is God’s gift to all of us, not just a privileged few. God’s Kingdom, as today’s Gospel reminds us is his gift to those whose treasure is the well-being of others and not self-seekers.