The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ

 Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 9th June 2026

1898 negative of the image on the Shroud of Turin, by Secundo Pia

It is unlikely that St Paul ever saw Jesus in the flesh, face to face.

But he tells the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 4:5-10), ‘It is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’.

In Acts we read that Paul, then called Saul, had a blinding vision of light on the road to Damascus. He heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:4-5). This encounter with the risen Christ changed everything for him. He became the Apostle Paul. He worked unstintingly to bring others to the knowledge of Christ. For Paul, I am sure, to see the face of Jesus is to feel the presence of the risen Christ in the most intimate way.

Like Paul, we have not seen the face of Jesus in the flesh. But we too meet the risen Christ in scripture, and in the sacraments. We have come to understand that ‘God… has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’. And we have heard Jesus declare ‘Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20).

Paul is clear that he is the slave of those he writes to, for Jesus’s sake. It is his ‘knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ which drives him to work for others, to be a slave for Jesus’s sake. And the same must be true for us.

But we are frail human beings. In Paul’s words, we are clay jars. The power to work for others is not our own. It ‘belongs to God and does not come from us’.

Paul goes on to acknowledge the trials the Corinthians are experiencing, and encourages them, saying, ‘We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed’. He tells them it is because he and they are ‘always carrying in the body the death of Jesus …that the life of Jesus’ may be revealed to others through them.

Like Paul and the Corinthians, we must feel in our innermost being, in our guts, the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Then we can see ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’. Then we need not fear anything, not affliction, not perplexity, not persecution, nor being struck down. Then we can live up to our calling, which is to show God’s love to others in the way we live our lives.

Paul's advice to Ephesians - and to us

St Paul writing, from an early IXth Century manuscript
in the Abbey of St Gallen, Switzerland 

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 13th May 2025

The first three and a half chapters of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians are deeply theological, about the relationship between God – as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and human beings – both individually and together as the Church.

But in today’s reading (Ephesians 4:17-32), Paul moves beyond theology to look at its ethical implications. That is, how the Ephesian Christians should behave to each other and to their neighbours. He insists that their Christian faith must make a difference to how they live. Now, Paul tells them ‘Put away your former way of life, your old self … and clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness’. And Paul continues with very specific advice about how Christians should behave:

You must speak the truth to your neighbours, because you are all members of one community. By neighbours, I am sure Paul means everyone in the community, not just those who are Christians.

If someone angers you, you must seek to make it up. Anger is not wrong in itself – remember, Jesus often showed righteous anger, for instance when driving the money-changers from the Temple. But if you let anger fester – if, in Paul’s words, you ‘let the sun go down on your anger’– you allow evil a way into your lives – you ‘make room for the devil’.

You must be honest in all your dealings – you should work for what you get, not steal it. And why? So that you have something to share with those in need. Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor – but this is not the Christian way: you must work, so that you have a surplus to give away to those who need help.

You must avoid speaking words intended to hurt others rather than help them. And, in this time of fake news, one might add, you must weigh up carefully what you hear, to avoid being deceived into doing what is wrong.

So, says Paul summarising, ‘Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you’.

Paul is addressing the Ephesian Christians of his own time. But his message is just as relevant to Christians in every time and place, and that means to you and me. We must:

• Speak the truth
• Not let disputes fester
• Be honest in all things with everybody
• Be generous to the needy
• Avoid hurtful speech, our own and others’

Let us all take Paul’s advice to the Ephesians to heart.

 

Celebrating All Saints

Address given at All Saints Stradbally (Castleconnell) on All Saints Sunday 3 November 2019

We are celebrating All Saints today - but who are these Saints we celebrate?

The common answer, I suppose, is that Saints are dead Christians who were most particularly holy and close to God, either because they lived such exemplary Christian lives, or because they died as martyrs for their faith in Jesus Christ.

But how can we be sure that any particular individual is a Saint?

No one would doubt, I suppose, that Jesus’s earthly family and close friends, and the Apostles and Evangelists we meet in the NT, were very close to God and worthy to be called Saints.

Later on, in the first Christian centuries, local churches and dioceses quite informally came to recognise other Saints, such as outstanding bishops, teachers, martyrs and missionaries within their own area - this includes our many early Celtic Saints.

The process of recognising Saints was gradually formalised over the years, until eventually in the pre-Reformation Western Church it was accepted that only the Pope in Rome could declare someone to be a Saint, after exhaustive enquiries and checks. By now there are thousands of them. I have a RC ‘Book of Saints’ at home which has alphabetical entries for almost 5,000 named Saints and groups of Saints, starting with St Aaron – a C6^th Breton Abbot, and ending with St Zoticus – a C4^th priest in Constantinople.

Today in the calendar of the CofI we also celebrate St Malachy, a C12th archbishop of Armagh, who was made a Saint in 1190 by Pope Clement III.

It is particularly important for RCs to have certainty about who is a Saint, because they believe in the intercession of Saints – that dead Saints can effectively intercede on our behalf with God, if we ask them to in prayer. Only God truly knows whether someone is a Saint, the theory goes, so no one is declared a Saint until God has demonstrated this by performing miracles in answer to prayers addressed to that person.

Most reformed Christians reject this practice of asking Saints to intercede – Article 22 of the 39 Articles describes the invocation of Saints as ‘a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God’. Nevertheless, Anglicans like us continue to honour Saints, at least those recognised before the Reformation. But we do so as examples of holiness and faith, in order to strengthen and encourage our own holiness and faith, and we do not ask them to intercede for us.

The Church of England has not declared any new Saints since the Reformation – with the odd exception of Charles I, who was honoured for political reasons as St Charles King & Martyr from the Restoration until 1859. But the Church of England Calendar does list many later Christians as worthy of commemoration, without explicitly calling them Saints. Not all of them are Anglican – they include for instance: George Fox the Quaker, Oscar Romero the martyred Bishop of San Salvador, and Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

We in the Church of Ireland are more parsimonious, but the BCP Calendar includes commemorations for two post-Reformation Bishops - Jeremy Taylor, bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore, and Charles Inglis born in Raphoe, a bishop in North America.

All of these are examples for us of holiness and faith – I suppose we might call them ‘heroes of the Church’ – and we are at liberty, I think, to consider them Saints too if we wish.

So far so good – but St Paul in todays reading from Ephesians 1:11-23 gives us a completely different view on who the saints are.

‘I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints’, says Paul. ‘I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ … may give you a spirit of wisdom … so that you may know what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints … for us who believe’.

It is clear from the context of this and other similar passages, that for St Paul the saints are all those who are ‘in Christ’, both those alive who believe and follow Jesus as his disciples, and those who have died. For the first Christians, the saints were not just exceptionally holy people, but also ordinary Christians like you and me!

We are all saints (with a small ‘s’) in this sense: we are sanctified, that is made holy, by being made part of the body of Christ in his Church at our baptism – the English word ‘saint’ comes from the Latin ‘sanctus’, meaning holy. Even though we know we are all sinners if we are honest with ourselves. We are not particularly holy, we often feel far from God – and, please God, we won’t be asked to die as martyrs. But we do try to live good Christian lives, and when we fail we seek forgiveness and try again. That is what makes us saints.

Those that we recognise as Saints (with a big ‘S’) and heroes of the Church are different from us in degree but not in kind – they too knew they were sinners. Even as marvellous examples of holiness and faith worth celebrating, they were human and fallible just like us. Remember, even the great St Peter was rebuked by Jesus with the words, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’.

I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that we should celebrate ourselves – how horribly narcisistic that would be – but surely at All Saints tide we should remember the saints (with a small ‘s’) from whom we have received our own faith, whether they are parents, teachers, friends, or others we have met on the way.

Since we are all saints, surely there are implications for how we should live our lives.

And I think Jesus spells them out for us very clearly in today’s 3^rd reading from Luke’s Gospel (6:20-31).

First, as saints we must never forget that we are blessed by God, whatever burdens we may carry. Jesus tells us:

‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man … for surely your reward is great in heaven.’

Second, as saints Jesus tells us that we must obey what is often called the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do to you’:

‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.’

How difficult these things are for ordinary, self-centred human beings! But they are commands from the very lips of Jesus, the Son of God. Unless we do our best, however poor, to follow them, we cannot claim to be part of the body of Christ, and we are not worthy to be called saints, even with a small ‘s’. No wonder we need the example of the Saints with a capital ‘S’ to show us that it is possible!

So to finish, as we celebrate the lives of all the Saints, let us pray:

God our Father, by our baptism you made us your holy people

and called us to share in the joy of your saints. 

May your Holy Spirit encourage and strengthen us

to live for others as Jesus taught us.

We make this prayer to you in His name.  Amen

Kind and forgiving, children of light

The 4th of 5 addresses on Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the 5 Sundays before Lent. This one given was given in Templederry, Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 27th February 2011, the 2nd before Lent.

The first four and a half chapters of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians are about theology.
They are about the relationship between God – as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and human beings – both individually and together as the Church.

In the first 3 of these 5 addresses, we explored key theological themes:

1. ‘We must start with Christ’;
2. ‘In Christ God is saving us by grace through faith for good works’; and
3. ‘In Christ we are members of God’s household, Christ’s Church’.

We looked at Paul’s beautiful metaphor of the church as like a building, knit together by Christ as the corner stone, with the Apostles and Prophets as foundation. And although we didn’t examine it, Paul at the beginning of Chapter 4 gives another lovely metaphor of the church as like Christ’s body, with Christ as the head and Christians as its different parts, each given different gifts and different roles.

But in today’s reading (Ephesians 4:22-5:14) Paul moves beyond his theology to look at its ethical implications for how the Ephesians should behave to each other.
‘You were taught’, says Paul, ‘to put away your former way of life, your old self … and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness’.

Paul continues with specific advice about how Christians should behave to one another:

• We must speak the truth to our neighbours, because we are all members of one community.
• If someone angers us, we must seek to make it up. Anger is not wrong in itself – remember, Jesus often showed righteous anger, for instance when driving the money-changers from the Temple. But if we let anger fester – if, in Paul’s words, we ‘let the sun go down on (our) anger’– we allow sin a way into our lives – we ‘make room for the devil’.
• We must be honest in all our dealings – we should work for what we get, not steal it. And why? So that we have something to share with those in need. Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor – but this is not the Christian way: we must work, so that we have a surplus to give away in charity.
• We should avoid evil talk – words intended to hurt others rather than help them – and this includes ‘obscene, silly and vulgar talk’, because ‘fornication and impurity of any kind, and greed’ cut us off from God. I find it interesting that Paul links fornication and greed in this way – for surely what is sinful about fornication is the greedy grasping at our own pleasure without thought for others.
• And we should weigh up carefully what we hear, in order to avoid being ‘deceive(d) … by empty words’ into doing anything which would incur God’s wrath.

So, says Paul summarising, ‘Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you… Live as children of light' – what a beautiful image - 'for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.’

And finally Paul quotes from what scholars believe is one of the very earliest Christian hymns, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you”.

Paul’s message to the Ephesians - and to us, for we are the present day Ephesians – is this: ‘In God’s household we must be kind and forgiving, we must live as children of light’. This is how God wants Christians to behave to each other, and towards neighbours. In fact, we are to love our neighbours as ourselves, just as Jesus taught us.

If you’ve been reading ahead, as I suggested, you will have found the next section of Ephesians (5:21-6:9) challenging.
Challenging particularly for women, but also I hope for those of us who are men! It would be wrong of me to just ignore it, I think. So let me try to unpick it.

‘Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ’, Paul tells the Ephesians. This ethical principle of mutual submission, of being subject to one another, is derived from his theological insight, that as God’s adopted children ‘In Christ we are all members of God’s household’ - Jew and Gentile, slave and free, men and women. Few would argue, I think, with the idea of mutual submission between those who live together in the same household – it is surely a recipe for peace and harmony!

But then he goes on to consider three pairs of personal relationships, in which he calls on one party to be subject to the other:

• ‘Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord… Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church’.
• ‘Children, obey your parents… And fathers, do not provoke your children to anger’.
• ‘Slaves, obey your earthly masters … as you obey Christ… knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord… And masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven.’

‘Wives, be subject to your husbands’, indeed! What a shocking thing for Paul to say! Nowadays almost all of us see equality between men and women as a fundamental human right, so Paul’s words shock us to the core today. But let’s not forget how recent this view is - in Irish law a husband owned all his wife’s assets until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, it was not until 1923 that Irish women got the general right to vote, and the ‘marriage bar’ required women to resign from the public service on marriage as late as 1973.

It’s hard not to see Paul as a sexist old curmudgeon, isn't it, but he was a man of his own time. Among all ethnic groups then – Jews, Greeks and Romans – women had few rights and were legally just appendages of their husbands. Paul made no attempt to lead his churches to challenge this, any more than he led them to challenge the institution of slavery. He seems to have shared the general view that women should be submissive and that there was nothing wrong with slavery. But if he didn’t share that view, it was surely wise of him not to challenge it directly – since the result would surely have been even greater persecution of his small and vulnerable churches.

But starting from his theological conviction that ‘In Christ we are all members of God’s household’, he argues for mutual submission, seeking to balance social and Christian obligations. The social obligation on a woman to submit to her husband is balanced by a Christian obligation on a husband to love his wife. The social obligation of children to obey their parents is balanced by a Christian obligation on parents to treat children fairly. And he balances the social obligation on slaves to obey their masters, with a Christian obligation on masters to treat their slaves well.

This is what we should learn from Paul, I believe - the ethical principle that we should be mutually submissive, one to another in all our personal relationships. We should apply it within our own society, in which we all accept the equality of women and the unacceptability of slavery, and we should also apply it within our own families. In giving advice to wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters, he was making the best attempt he could do to apply that principle to the specific social circumstances of his own time. It would be wrong to insist on it today in our different social circumstances. We should try to do better today than Paul could in his time!

I shall finish with a prayer:

Loving Father God,
may your Holy Spirit help us
to be kind and forgiving members
of your household the Church,
and show us how to be mutually submissive
in all our personal relationships,
that we may live as children of light.
Through your Son Jesus Christ we pray.
Amen

Members of God's household

The 3rd of 5 addresses I am giving on Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the 5 Sundays before Lent. This one given was given in Templederry and Nenagh on Sunday 20th February 2011, the 3rd before Lent.

Today we take the 3rd of 5 bites at Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
Taken as a whole the letter is, I think, the finest expression of Paul’s vision for his churches. It is an answer to the question, ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s Church’.

In the 1st and 2nd bites we reflected on the themes ‘We must start with Christ!’, and ‘In Jesus Christ, God is saving us by grace through faith for good works’.

This Sunday we look at the 2nd half of chapter 2, and a bit of chapter 3 (Ephesians 2:11-22, 3:8-13). The theme is ‘We are all members of God’s household, which is Christ’s church’.

What sort of people were the Ephesians to whom Paul wrote?
In Paul’s time Ephesus was the Greek-speaking capital of the Roman province of Asia, with a population second in the Empire only to Rome itself, perhaps as many as half-a-million. It was as vibrant and cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-faith as any modern European city is. And it was rich, as I saw from the amazing archaeological remains when I visited it 20 years ago, including an amphitheatre big enough for 20,000 spectators - still used for concerts.

Paul stayed in Ephesus for 2 years on his 2nd missionary journey, according to Acts. His first dozen or so converts had been baptised by John the Baptist – they were Jews like himself no doubt – Paul re-baptised them in the name of Jesus and they received the Holy Spirit. At first Paul preached the gospel in the Synagogue, but he encountered opposition there, so he withdrew elsewhere with his growing flock of Christians, both Jews and Greeks. By the time he left 2 years later, he had converted enough followers of the Greek goddess Artemis to threaten the business of local silversmiths who specialised in making shrines to her, provoking them to a nasty riot.

By the time Paul wrote his letter it is clear the Ephesian church was overwhelmingly Greek.

Paul addresses the Ephesians as ‘you Gentiles by birth, called the “uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”’
Called that is, by Jews – like Paul himself – who were traditionally brought up to despise and dislike Gentiles, whom they saw as immoral and unclean.

Paul believes absolutely in the continuity of the new faith in Christ that he preached, with the old faith of the Jews. He reminds the Ephesian Gentiles that before they became Christians they were cut off from the true God that the Jews knew. They were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world’.

But he is intensely conscious also of the staggering change that Christ brings to all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. Christ has ‘create(d) in himself one new humanity in place of (Jews and Gentiles), thus making peace, reconcil(ing) both groups to God in one body through the cross’. All Christians, whatever their background or traditions, are made one people in Christ, ‘for through him (all of us) have access in one Spirit to the Father’.

Paul’s insight is just as important for us in Nenagh today as it was for the Ephesians then. Our town, our country, is increasingly cosmopolitan like Ephesus. Our neighbours come from many countries, speak many languages and hold many faiths. The old divisions of Catholic and Protestant are increasingly irrelevant. All our churches must work together, we must break down the barriers between us, we must move from being exclusive to being inclusive, if we are ever to make a reality of Paul’s vision of one new humanity in Christ.

Only then will we be able to hear Paul’s words clearly, ‘So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God’.

Paul goes on to describe the Church as being built like ‘the household of God’.
The Church as a building is a lovely, suggestive metaphor. It is an alternative to the slightly more familiar metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, which Paul also uses later on in the letter (Ephesians 4:11-16).

It is ‘built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone’, says Paul. ‘In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God’.

Without the right foundations a building is unstable – as unfortunate people living in new Dublin housing estates have recently discovered, when foundations made from unsuitable pyrites rock swelled and cracked. The right foundation for the church is the teaching of the apostles – those Jesus sent out, of which Paul understood himself to be one – and the prophets – no doubt Christian as well as Hebrew prophets. As the church we must be grounded solidly in scripture before we can build anything worthwhile using tradition or reason.

In Paul’s day builders made sure the walls of a building were true by carefully aligning them with a cornerstone – Jesus serves that function for the church. Jesus joins all of us together into a structure worthy of God, in which we can find God present.

Is today’s church recognisable in Paul’s description? Or do we see instead a building site with a higgledy-piggledy jumble of jerry-built shacks and lean-to extensions, where the architect’s plans have been ignored? I rather think we all need some lessons in construction!

We are all members of God’s household, which is Christ’s church - whoever we are, wherever we come from!
Paul believed that by God’s grace he was chosen ‘to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God’.

God’s plan, in Paul’s words, is ‘that through the church’ – through God’s household, of which we are all members – ‘the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known … in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

This is the heavy responsibility we bear as Christians, as members of God’s household, built into Christ’s church – to make known the wisdom of God in all its rich variety.

Let us pray through ‘Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him’, that we may together play the parts God has given us in his plan as he intends we should play them.

Eternal God and Father,
whose Son at supper prayed that his disciples might be one,
as he is one with you:
draw us closer to him,
that in common love and obedience to you
we may be united to one another
in the fellowship of the one Spirit,
that the world may believe that he is Lord
to your eternal glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen

There are printed copies of the first 3 addresses at the back of the church, if you missed any or want to look back at them. But there’s no substitute for reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself, so you might like to read a chapter or so of Ephesians each week to keep pace with me. If you want to read ahead we will be looking at Ephesians 4:22-5:14 next Sunday, with the theme ‘In God’s household we must be kind and forgiving and live like children of light’.

Christian Tolerance

1. What a dramatic, blood-curdling story our 1st reading was (Exodus 14:19-31)!

Through the power of the LORD, Moses led the Israelites through the sea on dry ground, to escape from Egypt, but the pursuing Egyptian army were drowned, with all their chariots and all their horses. Christians traditionally see this story of the Exodus as a metaphor for how God will save his faithful people. But I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for the Egyptian soldiers, and for the horses!

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. Instead I shall focus on the 2nd reading, Paul’s eloquent plea to the infant Roman church for tolerance of the differing opinions of fellow believers. I want to tease out his advice, and reflect on its implications for today.

2. First let’s look at Paul’s views on tolerance, as expressed in the reading (Romans 14:1-12)

St Paul picks out two areas of dispute in the Roman church of his day. That church would have been made up of a mixture of Jews who accepted Jesus as Messiah and gentiles who followed Christ.

The first dispute was between those who would eat anything, and others who would eat only vegetables. Why should this be an issue? Probably because in Rome animals were always ritually sacrificed to the pagan Gods, before being sold as meat in the markets. Some Christians felt it was wrong to eat such meat. Particularly no doubt the Jewish converts who did not like to eat meat that was not kosher. Others were more liberal, including no doubt many gentiles. After all Jesus taught that it was not what went into the mouth that made one unclean, but what came out of it.

The second dispute was between those who treated one day of the week as a holy day, and those who treated all days as the same. This may well also be a split between Jewish and gentile factions, with the Jews wanting to maintain their Saturday Sabbath customs. But perhaps too some were beginning to celebrate Sunday as the Lord’s Day, commemorating Jesus’s resurrection.

Paul calls those who are vegetarian ‘weak in faith’. It is clear that Paul himself was a liberal in these matters. That’s worth noting. Some people today criticise Paul as a prejudiced old curmudgeon because of his views on the status of women, and on homosexuality. But in his own day, Paul was a liberal churchman!

Nevertheless, Paul calls on both parties to be tolerant. Do not judge one another, he tells them. God has welcomed you all. Each of you is accountable to God, so leave the judgement to God.

Paul is telling us that we should tolerate the odd views of others even if we believe them to be mistaken. But then, surely, we too are entitled to expect others to tolerate us, when we act on our own odd views? Anything goes! Wrong, quite wrong, that is not what Paul advises at all!

3. After the passage we’ve already heard, Paul said this (Romans 14:13-17):

Let us therefore no longer pass judgement on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling-block or hindrance in the way of another. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died. So do not let your good be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Beyond tolerance, Paul tells the Romans – and us I think - that the right Christian response to fellow Christians with whom one disagrees is to avoid doing things which they find hurtful, which would be a stumbling-block or hindrance to their faith. It is a message of loving self-denial. To do anything else, would be not to ‘walk in love’. And it is our Christian duty to walk in love with one another: Jesus said, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’.

4. So how might we apply Paul’s advice today?

Well, in our Anglican communion at present there are two big disagreements threatening to divide us: first, should women be ordained as priests and bishops, and second are same-sex relationships necessarily sinful. Paul’s advice is surely relevant to partisans on both these issues.

Now I am on the liberal side of both arguments. I think we have been blessed in the Church of Ireland with the ministry of women priests, and I look forward in due course to seeing women bishops. And I don’t believe that same-sex relationships are any more or less intrinsically sinful than heterosexual ones: what matters surely is the quality of the love in them. My heart bleeds for our homosexual brothers and sisters in Christ who are so often treated as 2nd class Christians.

Yet reflecting on Paul’s words to the Romans, surely he is right to remind us that the Christian way is not just to be tolerant, but to walk the extra mile in love with those who disagree with us.

Perhaps this is what lies behind the Archbishop of Canterbury’s call at the end of the Lambeth Conference for both sides to refrain, for now, from taking actions which hurt the other. He has called for moratoriums both on the blessing of same-sex relationships and the ordination of bishops who are in them. And he has also called for a moratorium on attempts by those who call themselves orthodox to prise whole parishes and dioceses from provinces they believe to be in error. Can both sides accept this, despite the pain they feel? Perhaps not, but surely by doing so they would be following both Paul’s advice and Christ’s commandment to ‘love one another as I have loved you’.

The Roman church overcame its disagreements. Paul’s views on eating meat were eventually accepted by all. All eventually agreed to keep the Lord’s Day holy, but dispensed with the Jewish Sabbath prohibitions.

Let us trust God and pray that the Holy Spirit will guide us all to a common understanding and unity in future, as it did the Roman church.

God suffers with us in Jesus!

1. Sickness brings patience, patience brings perseverance, and perseverance brings hope.

If you’ve ever been to the Galway Clinic, you’ve most likely seen these words, written on the wall in the reception area close to the chapel, and attributed to St Paul. When I first saw them, I thought what a strange thing to write on the wall of a hospital. If I were sick - in pain, frightened, suffering – I think I would rather resent the suggestion that I should display the virtues of patience, perseverance and hope. I would much rather someone just made my suffering go away!

These words are of course a variant translation of Paul’s words in his Epistle to the Romans, which we have just heard. ‘But we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’

Now we all know about suffering – to some degree or another it is a part of our common experience as human beings. And surely suffering is a bad thing, a manifestation of evil within the world. I don’t mean pain. Pain can be a good thing, when for instance it teaches us as children not to put our hands in the fire. And a little pain can even be pleasurable, like the slight ache I get when I’ve done a couple of hours hard digging in the garden. Suffering is more a psychological torment that comes from feeling bereft, out of control, in danger, unloved, hopeless, only sometimes from unremitting pain. Suffering drives us to forget everything and everybody else around us in our rage to be rid of it. Suffering is evil.

So how can Paul possibly ask us to ‘boast in our sufferings’? Doesn’t that sound a bit like glorying in something evil? Today I want to try and tease out some thoughts about suffering.

2. First let’s think about the causes of suffering.

Much of the suffering that we see about us and experience ourselves is caused directly or indirectly by you and by me, and by other human beings. The wholesale suffering caused by war, oppression and famine is driven by human greed and thoughtlessness. What you might call retail suffering, from hurtful words to a loved one up the scale to violence, rape and murder, are caused by individual people like us not living up to God’s loving message, expressed by Jesus when he summarised the Law - ‘You shall love the Lord your God, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself’. This suffering is the result of human sin. We are moral beings, souls, who know the difference between right and wrong. Yet we know too how we seem to be drawn to do what we know to be wrong or not to do what we know is right. We seem to be born that way - theologians call it original sin. We are all sinners, we all need forgiveness, and Jesus assures us that our loving-father God will forgive us if we truly repent.

But there’s an awful lot of suffering in this world which we really can’t trace back in this way to human sin. I’m thinking for instance of the suffering caused recently by the cyclone in Myanmar/Burma, and the earthquakes in Szechwan in China. I’m thinking of the suffering caused by illness and disease, for instance by viruses and cancers. And I’m thinking about the suffering caused by the fact of death – each one of us must face up to the fact that in the long run death will separate us from all that we know and love. All of this suffering seems to be due to the working out of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, biology, in the universe created by almighty God.

3. As Christians we believe our God is both almighty and loving.

But surely if God were really both, he would not allow such a burden of suffering to exist. He would not have made us humans subject to original sin, we would always be perfectly good, and we would never cause others to suffer. He would have created a universe in which natural disasters and disease were absent, and where we would be immortal. Therefore, some say, if God exists he can’t be both: if God is almighty he can’t always be loving, and if God is always loving he can’t be almighty.

This is known as the Problem of Suffering, or the Problem of Evil, and it has been debated by philosophers and theologians since time immemorial. I think the apparent paradox at the heart of it is something that prevents many thoughtful, caring people from accepting our Christian view of God. So how can we as Christians resolve it?

Many Christians, using an argument first made by St Irenaeus in the C2nd, suggest that God made us with free will, and therefore capable of sin which causes suffering, because only that way could we be souls, moral beings made in his image, capable of freely choosing good.

More recently others have extended the argument to suggest that it may be logically necessary for God to establish the universe with the natural laws it has, in order that beings like us can emerge who are free to choose to love. And surely a universe without freely given love but without suffering would be worse than one with both. One such is the eminent physicist John Polkinghorne, who is also an Anglican priest.

These are only speculations, and there are many others, which you can accept or not. But for myself, I think that I must accept as a Christian, with all humility, that I just do not know why God has made both human-kind and the universe such that suffering exists. I believe God is both almighty and loving, so I must also believe that he had sufficient reason to do so. But what that reason is is hidden from me. There is so much that is hidden from us, at least for now!

4. The Romans would have understood Paul’s reference to ‘our sufferings’ to mean their persecution.

Scholars say the letter was probably written by Paul around AD55. The Emperor Claudius had expelled Jews from Rome in AD49, ‘because the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus’, a likely misspelling of Christus, Christ. No doubt the authorities continued to make life difficult for the early Christians, and we know that in AD64 Nero was able to scapegoat them for starting the great fire during which he fiddled.

The way human psychology works, groups who are persecuted tend to be strengthened by it. No doubt these persecuted early Christians were proud of the endurance, character and hope they showed under persecution. I don’t think we should take the word ‘boast’ too seriously. No doubt Paul skilfully drew on their pride to get them to listen to his difficult theological message. But I don’t think in the context we can accuse Paul of glorying in something evil.

Rather I think what is important is to see what we can learn from Paul’s message.

5. What St Paul is teaching us, I think, is that God suffers with us in the person of Jesus.

As he puts it, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’. Jesus, with perfect obedience to his loving father God, suffered a cruel death on the cross in order to show us all how to deal with the suffering and death which every one of us will know.

‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit’, Paul says, just as Jesus promised us. It is this love which gives us the character to endure suffering, and never lose hope.

Our Christian hope is that by God’s grace our faith will justify us – that is our faith will put us in the right relationship with God – and so bring us ‘peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’.

God sent us his son, Jesus, to ‘proclaim() the good news of the kingdom’, as Matthew’s Gospel has it, and to show us his way of eternal life. He is always full of compassion for those who suffer.

How amazing it is that almighty God should make such a gesture of loving solidarity toward sinful people like you and me!

How comforting we find that solidarity when we ourselves suffer!

Let us thank God for expressing his solidarity with us in the life and mission, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.