Author: philipmcparland@hotmail.com

Radical Grace

Jesus once told a parable about a landowner who hired labourers to work in his vineyard (See Matt 20:1-16).  Some started work in the early morning, some at midday and some in the early evening.  In his generosity the landowner paid exactly the same wage to all who worked for him during the course of the day.  The actions of the landowner do appear to be unfair, even unjust.  Those who worked all day in the blazing hot sun received the same wage as those who worked one hour in the cool of the evening.

Today’s employers would certainly not get away with this approach to remuneration.  Ours is a culture of trade unions and worker’s rights and hourly rates of pay.  It is a culture of entitlement.  But Jesus’ parable is not about human rights and entitlements.  It is not about human justice.  It is about God.  It is about God’s abundant goodness and generosity. God isn’t generous towards us on the basis of what is right and fair and just.  God is generous towards us because we are his children, his sons and daughters whom he loves equally.

What Jesus is teaching us in this parable is this: we cannot buy or earn God’s love.  God’s love is free.  It is a gift, a pure gift offered to all without exception.  This is what we mean when we say that God loves us unconditionally.  There are no conditions attached to the way God loves.  The little word ‘if’ is not in God’s dictionary!  In practice this means that the Christian life is not about winning God’s approval and God’s favour.  It is not about making ourselves acceptable to God by our good deeds and our efforts to please him.  When we love we do so in response to God’s love for us; not in order to make God love us.

The renowned Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich, has described the experience of being saved as our acceptance of the fact that we are accepted unconditionally by God.  God’s salvation is free and we must accept it freely.  The Father’s love is gift, not achievement.  Those who came at the twelfth hour got the same wage as those who came at the first hour because God does not love those who came at the twelfth hour any less than those who came at the first hour.  This is what we mean by radical grace.

Belonging to the Kingdom

Even a brief look at the gospels reveals that a constant theme in the teaching of Jesus was the Kingdom of God.  Jesus made it clear that he had come to establish the Kingdom of God in the world.  His mission was to practice and preach the Kingdom.  The ministry of Jesus was to bring about the reign of God in our lives. 

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God is not a place or a territory.  It has nothing to do with geography or nationalism or indeed political power.  It is clear from the example and teaching of Jesus that the Kingdom of God is a way of life; it is about the values we chose to live by.  In particular, it is about the way we relate to each other.  In a word, it is about love.

Who then belongs to the Kingdom of God?  It would seem those who are sincerely trying to live what is known as the beatitudes in their daily lives.  These are the peacemakers, the gentle, the humble, the merciful, those who work for justice, those who are persecuted in the cause of right, those who have mellow and grateful hearts.   Jesus preaches a religion of the heart and his religion is about developing attitudes that create a right relationship with ourselves, other people, the environment and of course God.

It is important for us to realise that those who belong to the Kingdom of God may be members of the Church, but they may not. We cannot limit the Kingdom of God to the Church. To do so would be exclusive and misleading. Obviously the Church is a community where we are meant to experience the Kingdom of God, but there are many people who belong to the Kingdom of God who do not belong to the Church.  Indeed, there might be people who belong to the Kingdom of God and who do not have a conscious awareness of God in their lives.  We call these ‘anonymous Christians.’  Kingdom people are sincere people who show kindness and seek to do good. They try to make the world a better place, often working quietly in the background.  Kingdom people are a leaven in society.  They may not have a public profile but their positive influence is significant, reaching well beyond themselves and beyond even what they dare to imagine.  

Towards the end of St Matthew’s Gospel (chapter 25) Jesus makes it clear that we will be judged by the way we treat our neighbours, especially those who are struggling and suffering.  Surely this is the same yardstick for deciding who belongs to the Kingdom of God.

The Power of Love

Of all religious symbols I think it is fair to say that the most familiar and perhaps most popular is the cross.  Christians are baptised with the sign of the cross.  They begin their prayer with the sign of the cross.  The cross is hung in church buildings and religious institutions.  It is placed on top of monuments and displayed in many of our homes.  It is even worn as a piece of jewellery around the neck and in the form of a broch.

So why does the cross have such significance for us?  “This thing called love,” to quote the words of a well-known song by the late Johnny Cash. For Christians the cross is above all a symbol of love.  It is the symbol of the love we all hunger for, desire and need.

We cannot separate is the cross from love.  The cross makes no sense apart from love.  Jesus changed the cross from a symbol of failure and death to a symbol of victory and hope by his radical love.   Jesus lived by the ‘rule’ of love and he died in fidelity to this love.     

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16).  These are perhaps the most quoted words of scripture, displayed in all sorts of places and for all sorts of gatherings.  The greatest and most powerful revelation of God’s love was the death of his own beloved Son on the cross.  The cross is the symbol of the unconditional love that God has for each and every human person.  As we gaze at the cross how could we doubt that we are infinitely loved, how could we refuse to accept that we are cherished, precious, valued?  Through the symbol of the cross God says to each one of us, “I love you.”   

Unconditional love is the greatest power in the world.  It has the power to motivate, to liberate, to heal, to transform.  It even has the power to change death into life.  The power of the cross is the power of unconditional love. This is why Jesus said, “When I am lifted up on the cross I will draw all people to myself” (John 12: 32).  It is why the followers of Jesus continue to find hope and comfort in the cross.  And it is why the cross will always be the most used and most popular religious symbol of all.

Lord Jesus, each time I bless myself with the sign of the cross may I remember that you love me personally, intimately and unconditionally.

In All Things

Contemplative spirituality invites us to find God in all things. This invitation is based on the belief that God’s presence is revealed in and through the totality of our human lives.  We cannot limit God’s presence to the ‘religious bits,’ to what happens in church, to times of prayer, to the celebration of the sacraments. God’s presence is manifested in our encounters with other people, in our relationships, in the inner stirring of our hearts, in art and music and nature, in our times of leisure, in our pain and struggles, in the events of our daily lives.  All these things and more are sources of God’s revelations.  They are the window that looks inward to God.  The human life of every person is the holy ground, the sacred place, where God is met and known. 

For most people recognising the ways in which God is present in their lives does not come naturally.  Tuning into God’s presence is in fact an art and a discipline that needs to be cultivated.  Among the things that can help us to grow in contemplative awareness let me mention three.

(1) Take time to stand and stare.  Most people today are too busy to stand. Perhaps this is because they get their value from their work. A lot of the time we are in overdrive, under pressure to do, to achieve, to produce.  It seems we are not allowed to be anymore.  Perhaps we have lost the art of play.  Play is not only for children.  It is for adults too.  Play is a non-productive activity.  It allows us to be and to rejoice in the act of being. By taking time to stand we are free to stare.  Staring is a particular way of seeing, of looking at reality.  To stare is not to analyse or define reality.  It is to enter into communion with reality.  In the words of the late William McNamara it is to take a long loving look at the real. To be willing to take a long loving look at the real opens us to the reality of God and allows us to glimpse the God of reality.

(2) Pay greater attention to what is happening around you and within you.  There is an old Portuguese proverb which says, “When God wants to hide something he places it right in front of our eyes.”  Often God is staring us in the face and we do not see him!  Elizabeth Browning puts this well when she says, “Earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.  But only he who sees takes off his shoes.  The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.”  Perhaps we do not recognise God because we do not expect to find God in the ordinary things of life.  But the truth is earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.  Believing God is in the ordinary is one thing, being attentive to the ordinary is another.  Unless we are really paying attention to what is happening in our lives we are unlikely to notice the divine presence.  The practice of mindfulness, widespread today, is a way of paying attention to what is happening in our lives. This art can help us to develop our capacity to recognise the presence of God in all that is real.

(3) Practice a form of prayer known as the examen or review of awareness.  The examen is a form of prayer that comes from the Ignatian tradition.  In practice it involves spending about ten minutes before bedtime looking back over the day in the light of the question:  Where was God in my life today?  Gently surveying the day with this question in mind helps us to notice the way God is working is our lives and to realise how we can in fact find God in all things. It also increases our sensitivity to the movements, often subtle, of the Holy Spirit.

Experiencing the Trinity

Christians believe that God is a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  In other words, Christians believe that there is a community life in the reality we call God.  To find out what this means we can read the Scriptures.  But we can also explore our human experience.  If God has created us and our world, and if God is Trinity, then the Trinitarian life of God must be reflected in our human lives in all sorts of ways.

An obvious way is our social nature.  We are social beings.  We create relationships and we sustain relationships.  In fact, without relationships we wither and die emotionally, even physically.  John Donne once said that no man is an island unto himself.  We cannot survive in isolation.  It is in living with others, it is in loving others, that we find meaning and that we become our true selves.

Another way is the power of cooperation.  When it comes to a project, a task, an undertaking, the best results are usually achieved when there is cooperation, when people work together as a team.  Ask any sports person, any project manager, any government and they will tell you that the team effort is the best effort, it is the most fruitful and successful effort.  It is also the effort that gives most satisfaction and fulfilment to all those involved.

Then there is the unity of creation.  One of the things we are becoming more aware of today is the way creation functions.  The created world is interdependent.  One part of it affects another.  For example, the cutting down of the rain forests in South America has an impact on climate patterns in Europe and Africa.  The laws of nature are finely balanced and when they are allowed to work together in unity and harmony they fulfil their purpose.

And finally, there is this attempt by a woman to describe what trinity means in her life:

“I am a daughter and a wife and mother – three things, yet I am one totality.  To my parents, I would always be their child.  To my husband, a companion and a mate.  To my children, the one who gave them birth and nurtured them till they reached adulthood.  I seem to each of them a different person.  They each know a different kind of ‘me.’  But I am one, within myself a trinity and each of them finds unity in me.”

With Empty Hands

Our fundamental stance before God is one of receptivity.  All that is essential in our spiritual lives comes from God.  Let’s begin with God’s presence. We do not create God’s presence in our lives.  God’s presence in our lives is given.  In God we live and move and have our being.  As Hopkins so aptly put it, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Without God’s presence we would cease to exist.  God’s presence is a loving presence, a creative presence, a sustaining presence.  At every moment of every day God is loving us, creating us, sustaining us.

Similarly we do not create a relationship with God.  The relationship God has with us, with each of us, is given.  It is a natural consequence of God’s presence in our lives.  God’s presence creates relationship because God is Relationship.  To be God is to be in relationship.  This is what we mean when we say that God is Trinity.  Whether we are aware of it or not God is in relationship with us.  Spirituality is our discovery of this relationship.  It is our acceptance that we have received the gift of being in relationship with the Love that includes all things.

And then there is this Unconditional Love. We do not make God love us.  God’s love for us is free, unmerited, gratuitous.  It is pure gift.  The spiritual life is not about winning God’s approval and God’s favour.  It is not about making ourselves acceptable to God.  Our efforts, our good deeds do not force God to love us.  God’s love for us is given.  It is a fact.  It is with good reason that the late Henri Nouwen said that life is a short opportunity to say ‘yes’ to the unconditional love of God and death is a full coming home to that love. 

This is why we need a spiritual path that helps us accept the unconditional love of God.  The essential movement or flow of our spiritual lives is from God to us, not from us to God.  The spiritual life is not an ascending movement.  It is a descending movement.  We must learn to pray with open and empty hands. The foundation of the spiritual life is an acceptance that all is grace, all is gift, all is given.

Brother and Lord

“Jesus wept.”  This is what Jesus did when he heard about the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:3-45). It surely testifies to his humanity.  Jesus is the Son of Man, our brother.  He knows our struggles, our sufferings, our joys, our hopes, our pain, our grief.  He is our compassionate companion, the one who walks alongside us.  “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin.  Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:15-16).  It is his humanity that makes Jesus so approachable. We should never doubt that he is accessible and easy to reach.

Of course, at the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus showed himself to be more than our brother.  He brought Lazarus back to life, freed him from the chains of death.  Jesus is the Son of God as well as the Son of Man.  He is the Lord of creation, the one who has power over life and death.  To Martha, the sister of Lazarus, he said, “I am the resurrection.  If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26).  On Easter Sunday Jesus himself broke the chains of death and rose to a new way of living and loving beyond our wildest imagining.  Because of his resurrection he is the source of eternal life.

In life and in death we human beings are vulnerable and powerless.  We need someone who can support us in our struggles and who can save us from annihilation.  At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus reveals himself as a compassionate Saviour.  In life he is at our side as a faithful friend.  In death he is our hope of risen glory. Among the great world religions Jesus is indeed unique.  He is both the Son of Man and the Son of God, our brother and our Lord.

Jesus, I believe that you are my brother and my Lord.
Love me in my imperfection.
Strengthen me in my weakness.
Guide me in my uncertainty.
Forgive me in my failure.
Celebrate with me when times are good,
Carry me when they are difficult.
And when I die give me a share in your risen life.
Amen.