“Lord, open our hearts to the riches of your grace.”
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“Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
So the Lord asks those who hear him,
all those farmers and fishermen who know just how to interpret the appearance of the earth and sky.
“Hypocrites”, he says.
Their hypocrisy seems to be a refusal to see what God is about, a refusal to look for it.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m not very accurate in interpreting the weather either. But I’m not sure that lets me off the hook – maybe it just makes the case worse.
And our times are sorely in need of interpreting.
We have lived with verities for 80 years which are dissolving.
What guides can we find to interpreting the times?
Let me offer two:
one from today’s epistle reading, and one prompted by this time of year.
The reading from Hebrews drew us back into former times,
a memory of generations past who in their own day did not know what the outcome of their lives would be.
The ones of whom we heard first, Gideon, Samson, David, Samuel and the like, seem to be commended for success – conquering, administering justice, winning strength out of weakness.
And our own national story in the UK contains many such moments, not least those we remember from the Second World War such as the Battle of Britain and D-Day, maybe Imphal and Kohima.
But when we recall these heroes of ancient Israel, many of them from the pages of the Book of Judges, they were flawed people, ones who resisted the will of God.
Yet here they are, remembered for the achievements of faith.
And then, without warning, the list in Hebrews turns – did you notice?
It turns to those who were mocked, imprisoned and killed.
People whose lives ended far from worldly success.
And on these the Letter to the Hebrews comments: “of whom the world was not worthy.”
What unites these two groups as worthy, worthy of remembrance and emulation?
Of course, this list in Hebrews is about what is done through faith.
But its emphasis is on perseverance – on endurance when we don’t see the outcome of our lives.
And the great exemplar of this – the one to whom we can look when the going gets tough, and indeed to whom we are to look always – is Jesus, named here as pioneer, the first to reach the goal.
Or as the Letter to the Hebrews repeatedly emphasises:
Jesus both enters behind the Temple curtain to intercede for us, and
he sits at the right hand of the throne of God, justice done, creation perfected.
And then the writer includes that remarkable phrase: “they would not, without us, be made perfect.” It is necessary that we take our place in this chain of enduring faith through testing times – like a relay race, perhaps.
We can do so because in our troubled world we can look to Jesus and to the joy set before us all in him.
As we do now in this great Thanksgiving.
That then is one guide for us in interpreting the present time.
I promised a second, to do with the time of year.
Friday was VJ Day, 80 years on, the Feast of the Assumption.
And the day when we released the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, was the Feast of the Transfiguration.
There have been Japanese Christians who suffered from the bombing who have found strength to endure by pondering this.
But it another commemoration that is in my mind, one connected with both Japan and the Second World War,
the martyrdom of St Maximilian Kolbe on August 14th 1941.
You maybe know the story:
Maximilian Kolbe was a Franciscan Friar, a very ardent missionary, both in Poland and Japan, and he held a deep devotion to Mary Immaculata.
In the concentration camp of Auschwitz he offered to take the place of a prisoner selected at random to die, a prisoner who was married with children.
And he did die, a tortured death, just like those mentioned in our Hebrews list.
I read recently the book entitled Miracles by Sono Ayako.
She becomes curious about how a saint is declared – about how Maximilian Kolbe was declared a saint. The book is her account of poking her nose into this, digging out the people in Europe involved, of her jaundiced scepticism.
The healing miracles attributed to St Maximilian Kolbe don’t especially convince her; she’s trying to grasp what a miracle truly is.
And then she is seriously thrown by learning about Francis Gajowniczek
(‘ga-y-ov-nichek’), the man for whom Maximilian Kolbe substituted himself. When he got home, Gajowniczek (‘ga-y-ov-nichek’) learned from his wife that both his children, teenage boys, had died in the German bombing of Poland.
“So that’s what we can expect from the world”, she writes. “Father Kolbe endured two weeks without even water and finally was tortured to death, and what did it all lead to? He couldn’t even assure the happiness of a single household. It was just too much for me.”
She ponders over what Fr Maximilian did, and she finds herself reflecting on Jesus, on how he embodied the law of love in a very specific way –
transcending our thinking, our strength of purpose, our passion.
“If love is present,” she quotes, “death cannot win.”
“In a word,” she concludes, “Fr Kolbe did not die for the Gajowniczek (‘ga-y-ov-nichek’) family. The priest threw away his own life for the sake of life.”
So, to conclude, how should we read the signs of the times?
Well, not placing our hope in ‘the times’,
but – even in division as we know it – hold fast to the joy which Jesus knew was set before him,
and that is set before us:
the divine life in and through all things, all times,
however shameful, however costly.
“Lord, open our hearts to the riches of your grace.”
Amen.