Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 28 April 2013

St George

Fifth Sunday after Easter

In a week in which two Orthodox bishops were kidnapped in Syria and the plight of people in the Middle East gets worse, our minds perhaps turn to our brothers and sisters in the faith who suffer so much. Perhaps we can hold fast to the words from the book of the Apocalypse and pray that they may come to fulfillment; ‘…his name is God-with-them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death…..the world of the past has gone.’ That hope is ever present in our faith journey, it is a constant refrain in the liturgies of both east and west when we wait in ‘joyful hope for the coming of our saviour’.

In our world of constant change and continuing problems we carry on trying to live the good life and be good Christian people, yet from time to time things are just too overwhelming for us. When this moment comes we must not give up hope. The long history of faith stretching back long into Israel’s deep journey with God shows that even in desolation God-is-with -us, God who came in the Christ Emmanuel!

In the first reading Paul and Barnabas go back to Antioch, the very place where we got our name Christian, older in setting than Rome and where today so much hardship is still endured by faith communities of both Christianity and Islam. The kidnapped bishops come from this area and here today oriental orthodox Christians and Catholics struggle to survive amongst them my own community of Melkites. These faithful people are families of Christians stretching back in historical lineage to the time of Paul and Barnabas, a living link with the early church who have often been called the ‘living stones’. In so many ways those eastern churches, so often persecuted, poorer than their western counterparts share with us a deep faith and hope for they encourage us to’ persevere in the faith’.

Even our patron saint of England, George, links us directly to the Christian communities of the Middle East for that is where he comes from, a saint for both east and west and who is an ecumenical bridge, he is loved by Moslems and Christians alike. We might be tempted to despair given what we se around us, but these poor, little communities of ancient Churches reach out to us , they are the little ones loved by God, they teach us as Jesus tells us in the Gospels today, that it is not power or riches or buildings but the love we have for one another that reveals to the world the presence of Christ in us.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.