St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
Parish Canterbury
| Archive |
| Contacts |
| How to find us |
| Links |
| What's New |
| Site Map |
| Home Page |
A few years ago I went to see a play at the Marlowe about the knights who murdered Thomas Becket. They were holed up in Knaresborough Castle waiting to see what would happen to them. Eventually I believe they were allowed to leave and were not held to account, the King having accepted his own responsibility. The play was of course imaginary and showed them arguing, fighting and every so often putting on a show of penitence for their visitors. But towards the end came a strange revelatory moment: one of them started denying the existence of God, since God does not intervene in human suffering and trouble; another of them said God keeps his distance from us because we could not cope if he came near.
That seems to be the gist of today's post-communion collect: "Show us your glory as far as we can grasp it, and shield us from knowing more than we can bear". It is a curious prayer and rather wonderful.
In the extract from Matthew's Gospel chapter 9 that is our Gospel today we see the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ in a series of encounters and actions. How do we read what happens? A man called Matthew who is a tax collector is called to join the followers of an itinerant preacher: well, that's interesting but not particularly spectacular; the same teacher sits down to a meal with some local outcasts and tells some officious Pharisees that God prefers to be with people who need help than with people who don't- that is also interesting but not outside the bounds of reality; then two remarkable things happen: a women who has suffered a debilitating and unpleasant haemorrhage touches the same man's cloak - and recovers; he tells her her faith has healed her; then he goes to the house of a person who has died and brings her back to life.
Anyone could say that the two healings could be medically explained; the woman was on the road to recovery; the child had not really died. We don't however hear people arguing about Matthew's call or what Jesus said to the Pharisees? Why not - well because it is within the normal range of what we can believe, while the other two incidents require faith in miracles or explanations. But look at those first two incidents: Matthew, a tax collector, just walks out of a life that made him an outcast for many and joined a group of people of all backgrounds embracing a new and different future; a group of similar people, many of them what we might call lowlifes, hear that the God who seemed to be the preserve of the holy and the respectable is actually much more interested in them, in fact sitting among them. Is there such a great difference between the first two and the last two? Are they not all about healing and restoration, about the recovery of life and hope?
Jesus's words and deeds all reveal the glory of God, sometimes in ways we can grasp, sometimes in ways that we cannot comprehend but take on trust. If we look for miracles every day, we will find them.
Amen.
