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"What does he think I am, a ....
canary!"
Those of us who are accustomed to wearing
microphones are also aware of danger of not switching them off!
Alas for Mr Brown this week who also forgot this Golden Rule!I am less concerned with what Mr Brown said - few of us go through life without making some disparaging remark about others. Mr Brown apologised but by that time the lady involved had fallen into the hands of a publicity agent and the press was having its usual field day. "Brown's Finished" was one of the milder headlines. If I thought for a moment that the Government of this country was decided by a misguided remark by one of our political leaders, I would emigrate immediately to the Antarctic.
The Metro had a headline which rather suits my purpose this morning. It blazed across its front page, "From Sinner to Grinner". It meant it disparagingly, of course, but from a Christian point of view it has a much deeper point to make. When we offend someone and apologise (especially publicly) we can hope for forgiveness, which does, of course, turn a situation round. Sadness can give way to happiness. After all, we are told by Jesus that there is joy in heaven when a sinner repents. (Luke 15:7).
There is a bigger issue here and it is forcefully put by Jesus in today's Gospel. At the end of the emotionally charged 'Last Supper', after Judas had gone out to begin his act of betrayal, Jesus knew, by this time, that what Judas was about to unleash - the fury of the authorities - would lead to his Crucifixion. No doubt had The Sun been around at the time, it would have carried a full page photo of Calvary with the banner headline 'Finished' which would have been more accurate than it realised for that is what Jesus proclaimed as God's banner headline from the Cross -
It is finished. It is
accomplished.
What was accomplished is there is today's
Gospel. God was glorified and humanity was shown how eternally,
completely and unconditionally we are loved. And because of that,
Jesus insisted in today's Gospel that we are to Love one another, just as I have loved you.
Here then is the bigger issue - because God loves
us, we are to love one another and that is THE Golden Rule by which we
are to live and by which we are to deal with each other. Love is also linked to repentance because we aren't just to love but to love as Christ loves us. For us to understand the force of such love we need repentance - which has the true meaning of turning our lives around so that once again we are facing God. Only by facing our lives towards God will we feel the full force of Christ's love for us.
All Sin turns us away from God. It thwarts his loving purpose for our lives and it disfigures His Image in us. When we sin, we turn away from the light of God's love towards the darkness of the demonic forces which are the enemy of God and whose total purpose is to stop God's love from taking root in our lives and in the world.
So often, this phrase, Love one another, comes over as a bland exhortation to be nice to each other. As the Gospel Prayer in today's Newsletter* puts it, the kind of love that is fair weather, hearts and flowers love. Loving one another isn't to be anything like that - it's much more dynamic - as the prayer goes on to say, it is love which is without limits and involves us in giving everything. This is, of course, is why such Love is linked and rooted in the Cross because there, on Calvary, Jesus gave everything - his total being in order to win us back to heart of God's love. The implication for us is that we, who claim to be people shaped by the love of God, must behave towards each other as God behaves towards us. There can be no compromise about this. To dilute it is to practise something which is not of God and if it is not of God, then it is nothing to do with us.
There is, in Christian theology a spirituality which is sometimes called the negative way. This is about renouncing in our lives, and in the world, those things which are not of God - Things within oneself which thwart God's action of love in our hearts. If we are to truly experience God's love and so become reflections of that love we must work hard to get rid of lesser loves or false loves within our hearts. Time and again, spiritual writers of the Church have written of this and it is classically described by Charles de Foucauld, known more affectionately as Brother Charles of Jesus, who after a life of debauchery, repented and turned his life back towards the love of God. Living in the North African desert among the Tuareg people, he taught them the Gospel of Jesus Christ and of Lord's way of Loving. His life became the inspiration for the now world-wide religious community of the Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus. From the depth of his own experience of, first not loving God and then embracing God totally, he wrote:
We must be poor in spirit, stripped of all
love and attachment for what is not God; utterly emptied of everything
that is not God; loving nothing that is not God; thinking of nothing
that is not God; desiring nothing that is not God. Stripped of
ourselves and others, not looking for our own or other people's good
for its own sake, but pursuing only the glory of God for His sake alone.
What is particularly powerful about these words
is that they were written by someone whose way of life had been so
dreadful that God was the last thing on his mind. Having tried
lesser loves, including sexual liaisons with other people's wives, he
found himself sick in his soul. Searching for a new purpose and
real meaning, he turned to a wise priest from whom he sought
instruction."It is not instruction you need, my son," said the old man. "It is forgiveness."
Only when Charles repented did he discover how much God loved him, and it changed his life. It changed the way in which he saw himself and it changed the way in which he saw others.
As Christians we are constantly called to measure our lives against Christ. We are constantly called to self-examination, the spiritual act of looking into our hearts and seeing what is not of God within them. One of the rubrics or rules of the Book of Common Prayer regarding the receiving of Holy Communion reminds people that all persons diligently try and examine themselves, before they presume to eat of that Bread and that Cup, for the benefit is great. I presume, of course, that all here present has done just that before you set off for Church this morning!
In that wonderful Psalm, often called the Hound of Heaven - Psalm 139 - after the psalmist tries hard to escape from God and from God's taking over his heart, he ends with a submission to God which is wholehearted and he prays:
Try me, O God, and seek the ground of my
heart;
Prove me, and examine my thoughts,
Look well if there be any way of wickedness in me;
And lead me in the way everlasting.
The purpose of such
self-examination is not primarily to convict ourselves negatively of
sin and concentrate totally on what is wrong with us. Therein
lies guilt which is a denial of God's forgiveness. The purpose is
to recognise where we are failing God and turning our hearts back to
him so that he can purge us, cleanse us, of those things in our life
which are stopping us from becoming totally loving and loved
people. The thing about confession or examination of our sins is
that it is always leads to repentance which is turn brings God rushing
into our lives, filling us with his loving spirit. It's really
Prodigal Son stuff, or as Cardinal Newman put it so wonderfully:Prove me, and examine my thoughts,
Look well if there be any way of wickedness in me;
And lead me in the way everlasting.
The good God makes more hast to forgive a
repentant sinner than a mother to snatch her child from the fire.
We search our hearts and expose in them what is
not of God in order for God to sweep these things away with his Love.In order to love on another as Jesus tells us to love we have to start with the right kind of self love which is not to be confused with self-centred love. True self love is an acceptance that we really are, each one of us, a child of God. Jesus' great commandment is that we should:
Love God with all our heart, with all our
soul, with all our mind, and our neighbour as ourself.
Only those who truly love themselves as made in
God's image can reach out in love to others.Earlier this week, I read a truly wonderful thing. It is in a book by a spiritual writer of the Orthodox Church, Olivier Clément called On Human Being and he had this to say:
Each one of us is sufficiently important
to the risen Christ to be received by him face to face in his
kingdom. There is no question of comparison; Christ prefers each person ... He turns to each to say, You are the one I choose.
Isn't that marvellous! So marvellous that
we would be mad not to accept ourselves as Christ accepts us; to love
ourself as Christ loves us. When we truly do this, we realise
that as far as God is concerned we are each one of us of infinite worth
to him - worth which sends his love constantly into our hearts. One of my screen-savers on my computer is of a waterfall with water constantly gushing over the rocks in a great cascade. That's what the love of God is like - it is a constant cascade pouring over us and into us. We don't have to score points off each other, nor be threatened by each other to receive that love and if we realise that all are in the same way loved, then it can make a difference how we treat each other. When the love of God within us recognises the love of God in another then we can only treat them as Jesus does - they become precious to us, cherished by us and respected by us. What turns the world round is when we love and respect each other - when we believe that human beings are special to God and are in a special relationship with Him. If that were not so, why would he have bothered to become one like us in Jesus Christ?
Because all are special we have no right to judge others nor to believe that we are somehow better than another. We have no right to exclude others or treat them badly. We have no right to belittle their efforts; we have no right to join the prevailing ethos of our culture to do people down and destroy their character, as our media unfailingly do. We have no right to treat people as if they were subhuman; We have no right to decide who can live where or who will die today in third world countries because of our Western greed; We have no right to decide who can or cannot be part of God's Kingdom or who must conform to our view of things; we have no right to harm or destroy others with our words or thoughtless action.
Jesus gives us only one right - to love them as He loves Them and Us. For by such love they will know that we are our Lord's disciples.
* Christ, let us discover the one thing necessary
To receive and
give their love.
Not fair-weather, hearts-and-flowers love,
but your own, kind love, without limits
giving our money and possessions,
and our bodies and our blood,
and our hearts and our souls,
our hands and feet, our precious time.
Not fair-weather, hearts-and-flowers love,
but your own, kind love, without limits
giving our money and possessions,
and our bodies and our blood,
and our hearts and our souls,
our hands and feet, our precious time.