‘Be afraid. Be very
afraid’
I’m sure
you’ve heard this popular catch-phrase – it’s used to warn us that something
dire is about to happen, in a menacing but slightly jokey way. But do you know
where it comes from? It’s from the 1986 remake of the science-fiction horror
movie The Fly, in which a mad
scientist experimenting with a matter transporter mixes up his DNA with a fly’s, and gradually changes
into a horrific creature, half-man and half-fly.
I’ve
noticed that people seem to be using this catch phrase rather more often recently, perhaps
because so many of us really are feeling afraid, very afraid, about what can
seem like a threatening, dangerous future.
- Think unemployment, poverty and
emigration for our children - due to economic collapse.
- Think rising sea levels,
droughts, floods - due to catastrophic climate change.
- Think famine and wars - due to resource
exhaustion and rising population.
It would be
very easy to let ourselves be overwhelmed by pessimism, to feel the future is
hopeless. But that would immobilise us. It would prevent us from responding to
the real dangers we face. And it would make the bad outcomes we dread more
likely.
That is not
how we as Christians are called to behave. The future is not hopeless. God has
given us a great gift of hope - hope for the coming of God’s kingdom. And surely
we must share this gift of hope with others, who may not share our faith, but
badly need our hope.
The ground of our hope is our conviction that
God loves us.
This is at
the heart of the good news that Jesus preached. But its roots go back much
further. The OT tells the story of how over hundreds of years the children of Israel gradually came to understand that God
- the terrifying mighty creator - also loves his people. As Psalm 29 which we
have just read puts it, the God whose voice ‘breaks the cedar trees’, ‘shakes the wilderness’ and ‘makes the oak
trees writhe and strips the forest bare’, is also the God that ‘shall give
strength to his people’ and ‘shall give his people the blessing of peace’.
Nowhere is this
more beautifully expressed than in today’s 1st reading from Isaiah
(Isaiah 43:1-7). Scholars tell us that this passage was probably written around
540BC. The children of Israel are in captivity in Babylon . They are afraid for their future,
on the verge of giving up hope that they would ever be able to return to their
homeland. So the poet seeks to encourage them in these words:
‘But now thus says the Lord, he
who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel :
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I
have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will
be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when
you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not
consume you.’
And why should the captive children of Israel not fear?
‘Because
you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you.
…
Do
not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from
the west I will gather you; I will say to the north, ‘Give them up’, and
to the south, ‘Do not withhold.’’
These are beautiful, encouraging
and reassuring words, aren’t they?
‘Do not fear … because you are precious in
my sight, and honoured, and I love you’.
The poet’s
words were prophetic – some of the exiles did indeed return from Babylon .
500 years
later the Jews of Jesus’s time were utterly convinced that God loved them and
this gave them hope for the future, even though their country had been
conquered and occupied by the Romans.
But they
saw God’s love in exclusive terms: they felt God loved the Jewish people, the
children of Israel, in a special way; they were God’s chosen people, with whom
God had established a covenant; and they lived in hope for the coming of a promised
Messiah, the anointed one of God, who would restore the fortunes of his chosen
people. Other people really didn’t really count.
This is the
background to Luke’s account of Jesus’s baptism by John in our 2nd
reading (Luke 3:15 -17, 21-22), in which God marks Jesus out as
the Messiah. God as a loving Father sends the Holy Spirit in the form of a
dove, and says, ‘You are my son, the beloved; with you I am
well pleased’, in an echo of Isaiah’s words. It is the only
place in the Bible where we encounter all 3 persons of the Trinity at the same
time – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
The first
Christians were Jews, and we have inherited their Jewish conviction that God loves
us, and with it God’s gift of hope – thanks be to God for the insight of the
Jewish people! But from the very start, with a fresh insight, Christians
transformed the conviction of God’s love from being exclusive to Jews to being
inclusive of all people. We believe as Christians that God loves all people
created in his image, not just Jews but gentiles like you and me, not just
white people but people of all colours and ethnic origins, not just those who
are like us but those we find alien.
In this I
feel sure we follow Jesus himself. But it is interesting to notice how Jesus’s own
understanding developed over the course of his ministry. Matthew’s Gospel
records him telling the Canaanite woman ‘I was sent only
to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matt 15:24); but by
the end of the same Gospel he would say to his disciples, ‘Go
therefore and make disciples of all nations’ (Matt 28:19).
The Epiphany season is traditionally a time to
reflect on how God reveals his nature to us.
So to
finish, I invite you to ponder God’s loving nature, revealed in Isaiah’s
beautiful poetry:
Thus says the Lord…, ‘Do
not fear … because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love
you’.
Let us give
thanks for the insight which we have inherited from the ancient Hebrews and the
first Christians, that God loves all his people.
The
implications are surely life-changing:
·
Because
we believe that God loves us, we live in hope.
·
Because
we live in hope, we do not fear the future, no matter how dangerous it may seem.
·
Because
we do not fear the future, we have the confidence to work for God’s kingdom.
All this
poses a great question to each one of us – and to us all as a body, Christ’s
body, the Church. The question is this:
What am I - what are we - going to
do to make God’s kingdom a living reality?