By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
- Monday
- Don't comfort me
Matthew 2: 13 - 18
You can get a good idea of what the Christian faith is all about from the songs and stories of Christ's nativity. For centuries, writers of every tongue and age have found them irresistible. They are replete with simple and telling detail. Shepherds and kings and flight in the night. A young woman, in travail far from home, gives birth in a stable.
What is most captivating about the stories are the reversals they set forth. Royalty has a radically humble birth. The very town that is named in prophecy as the birthplace of the promised king has no house-room for his birth. The lowly are exalted and the exalted are brought low. The hungry are filled and the well-fed are sent away empty. The Word became flesh. And these stories maintain their captivating charm year after year through the centuries, no matter how familiar they become.
But when you take them all in, you find they do not make a charming bundle. We have managed to charm away the rush of fear felt upon the announcement to Mary, and the shining of the glory of the Lord upon the shepherds. We are inclined to pass up Simeon's warning and we block out the slaughter of the innocents.
- Simeon is that faithful old Israelite who had been promised he would live to see the Lord's Christ. Upon seeing the baby Jesus and his parents in the temple he is ready to depart in peace. He blesses the parents and says to Mary,
- "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword shall pierce through your own soul also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed."
Luke 2: 34b - 35
The salvation talked about here contains something deeper than charming reversals.
It includes divisiveness, penetrating revelations and painful relationships.
The slaughter of all the male children of Bethlehem is an even more jarring piece. This kind of violence has not departed the human scene. Our own times confront us with an overwhelming number of slaughtered innocents. Sometimes it is the direct action of tyrants, sometimes the indirect outcome of virtuously defended national policy and sometimes the accumulated result of a mass of little human ncglects. This kind of violence is a fact of human existence and is enormously shattering.
- In telling the Bethlehem story the writer of Matthew quotes a passage from Jeremiah as a kind of reflective comment.
- A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachael weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more.
I find this a profoundly appropriate comment. If you are going to put together God's love of the world and the way the world is, then there is no way you are going to be consoled about some things. Nor is there any call to be.
If God loves the world, the state of mourning can be a blessed state.
- Thy Kingdom Come
Almighty God - The world needs praying for.
Its suffering and pain are beyond us.
There is so much beauty and promise to it but it goes so terribly wrong. - Its people are such a mixture of bravery and cowardice,
- nobility and selfishness, kindness and cruelty, tenderness and violence.
- We shut out the world.
We collapse under its weight.
We run with little remedies.
We punish ourselves with gloom.
There is nothing for it but to pray and pray and pray and not faint as you said.
Almighty God, hear our prayer.
Your Kingdom come.- Your Kingdom come.
- until that prayer fills all our hearts;
- until readiness to receive your kingdom fills all our hearts;
until faithfulness to our particular call fills all our days.
Amen