Sunday Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons - 21 March 2021

Mar 20th, 2021

Bedford Hours

5th Sunday in Lent

Give me back the joy of your salvation,
and a willing spirit sustain in me.
I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners shall return to you. ( Ps 51: 13,14)

I thought that this quote from psalm 51 could start out my shared thoughts with you this Sunday. Isn't this perhaps what a lot of us are feeling in Lockdown? There is joy perhaps but significantly muted and my willingness to do this is tinged with tiredness and something else, a spiritual emptiness which is not just about the inability to go to communal prayer, nor the nourishment I still receive from the Holy One, but a wider deeper malaise about a whole attitude that is antithetical to our vocation as Christians.

I didn't listen to the broadcast by the Sussex's, but like many I felt that they, the media and a celebrity culture cheapened our values. Truth is not a commodity for us, forgiveness is not contingent upon each one of us having our say tit for tat, being an adult also means learning the values of the Holy Spirit, prudence, charity, proper forgiveness, respect and sometimes, as Jesus will show us when we move through our Holy Week, the quiet and dignified aspect of suffering in a quiet way whilst reaching out. I think after this week I have had just enough of this culture and as that psalm says, I will pray hard and insistently: 'Give us back Holy One, a willing spirit, that by example I may do what I am called to do, seek and bring salvation!'

Yet more is asked of us, our second reading from Hebrews reminds me, I hope you too, that key gifts given us from the Spirit are also part of a two way process by which we dialogue with the Almighty. Obedience has its roots in the verb 'to listen, to discern', not alone, but with another. True obedience is a communication between God and ourselves, in our conscience where deep in the 'heart' our mind learns to listen to the still small voice revealed around and in us, but also where we are given the gift of inner strength to argue the case, to really look at all the angles, to even say 'No!':

'He was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him'.

(Heb 5:6-9)

Note the real stress here in Hebrews, is on the components that make up Jesus' ability to listen deeply and to hear what is being asked, obedience is learnt not earnt ! It is a long process, and it also requires of us a toughness, that is the kind of suffering which we all face, of having to take and make difficult choices, perhaps as I have suggested, to say a 'no' in order to freely say 'yes'! Our future perfection is to be complete, to be whole, to be one with the Maker of All, that is our destiny-but it only comes when we have made that surrender in a final 'yes' to the Lord of the Resurrection.

And so, suddenly the words of Jesus in the Gospel make sense, hear them as if Christ is speaking to you directly, for this prayer is His for us all, each and everyone:

'Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life* loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honour whoever serves me'.(Jn 12: 25,26)

There is a deep and abiding comfort in these words, for no matter what happens, Christ is also the I AM, second person of the Triune God, and we who follow him will never be let down or betrayed or dismissed. To serve Him is to serve others, to care, to love to reach out. Our sister death is not an enemy but a necessary friend, for all must die so that all, like a grain of wheat, need to break down in the dust of death in order to grow again, and we gain eternal life, 'preserved' as the very best we can be, for resurrection is not into cosmic nothing, it is as ourselves, with all we love, individuals transformed and transfigured, new growth, that is our destiny!

Thank you Lord Jesus!

Lectio

From the last homily of Oscar Romero, on the Gospel about the grain of wheat , preached moments before he died 24th March 1980.

'You have just heard in the Gospel of Christ that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and that those who try to fend off the danger will lose their lives. But whoever out of love for Christ gives himself to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies…only in undoing itself does it produce the harvest.'

Malcolm Guite

Poem

Unless a grain of wheat shall die!

Oh let me fall as grain to the good earth

And die away from all dry separation,

Die to my sole self, and find new birth

Within that very death, a dark fruition,

Deep in this crowded underground, to learn

The earthy otherness of every other,

To know that nothing is achieved alone

But only where these other fallen gather.

If I bear fruit and break through to bright air,