Beautiful feet – Lent I, 12 February 2016

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”  (Romans 10: 12-15)

(At the risk of skiting… that last sentence after all those rhetorical questions is a textbook example of the figure of speech called metonymy, or perhaps synecdochy.  I don’t think anyone ever teaches these things these days.  And human feet are not normally depicted as beautiful.)

This is the Epistle for this Sunday, Lent I.  In a world such as ours is, and is becoming, relentlessly splitting between rich and poor, Moslem and Christian or Jew, white and coloured, lawful and lawless, right-wing and left-wing, old and young, and still in places male and female, St Paul’s insistence to the Roman church of his day seems clear enough if you profess to be a Christian.  In the faith of Christ such distinctions, divisions, are out of order.  You cannot proclaim Jesus, you cannot teach the way of Christ, you cannot live authentically as a Christian, in partiality or discrimination.  There is neither Jew nor Greek… refers to the major religious distinction in Paul’s day.   Paul stresses this in two or three places.

And that, he says, is good news.  Of course, it carries all manner of risks.  People who prefer to eliminate risk from their lives therefore find ways to ration the indiscriminate grace of God.  The favourite course is to say in subtle or unsubtle ways, you need to be righteous, or you need to be like us.  The corollary is often:  If you do what we say you will become like us… happy, wealthy, successful...  The good news is that God in Jesus pulls down these walls and requirements, supersedes the divisions we have made and so often fiercely defend.

A discipline of contemplative life and prayer alters our attitudes to fences and boundaries, walls and self-protection.  We may not have the slightest idea how myriads of people, all different from each other and from us in all sorts of ways, can live together in community in peace and respect.  But we nevertheless find the fear of difference being removed from our hearts by grace.  We find ourselves increasingly open to the new, while being at the same time as grateful as ever for the past and the old and the familiar.  The Spirit of Jesus, who seemed never to hesitate to cross boundaries and befriend outcasts, whose closest friends included women and tax-collectors and social riff-raff, is the Spirit we consent to in the stillness and silence of our prayer.