Fr. Henry O’Shea:
The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.
My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself,
Myself the rose you acheive—-
This body,
This ivory Sylvia Plath: The Childless Woman
Some of us may still be familiar with the old question asked when hearing of the birth of a baby, ‘Is it a boy or a child?’. I think that it is true to say, that despite all our alleged sophistication, our different ideas of what we consider progress, most societies are still obsessed with male succession. Look where it has got China. Look at our own history of land ownership.
The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, has many stories of the longing for a son. In today’s first reading, the story is of the prophet Elisha and of the hospitable woman of rank, who is promised a boy-child.
To this story can be added the stories of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Hannah, to name only a few. Just four days ago we celebrated the Birth of John the Baptist, himself not only a gift to his ageing parents, but also the prophet of one whose birth was the most wonderous of all time, Jesus himself.
While not denying the social, cultural and economic background and context of these biblical stories, their common thrust is that of highlighting God’s sovereignty and the fulfilments of his promises. In a society, or societies, where a woman’s worth was and can still be measured by her ability to bear children, the biblical accounts of barren women emphasize God’s compassion and intervention, his challenging of cultural norms and his affirming of the value and dignity of every individual, regardless of their ability to be and do things demanded by any prevailing group-think.
In many cases, the birth of a child to a barren woman signifies a turning point in the biblical narrative, marking the beginning of a new chapter in God’s redemptive plan. The miraculous births underscore the belief that God is the giver of life and that his purposes transcend human limitations. Hence John the Baptist. Hence Jesus.
Seen against this background, we can begin to make sense of what initially might seem to be Jesus’ weird and counter-intuitive instruction to his Apostles in today’s gospel: No one who prefers father and mother to me, son or daughter to me, anyone who does not take the cross and follow in my footsteps, is worthy of me.
Over the past few Sundays, our readings from St Matthew’s Gospel have presented us with a series of such baffling and apparently contradictory sayings. But, like the stories of the so-called barren women, these sayings, too, have to be read in context.
Recently, while surfing the net, I came across an American evangelical site that offered 50 quotations from the Bible for every theme under the sun, themes from wine to weeping, from love to lust, from hatred to holiness. Virtually all of these quotations were from the Old Testament and virtually all of them were lifted from the context in which they were written.
The Bible is not simply a quarry that provides verbal stones, stones either to hurl at other people or stones to build castles or fortresses of our own imaginings and built of and for our need for comfort, consolation or, indeed, isolation. The Bible did not arrive in one piece, at one point in time, leather-bound, gilt-edged and ready for instrumentalilsation like a user-manual or holy tool-kit.
The Bible, is the record in many literary genres – compiled over centuries – of God’s gradual, developing and, above all, loving relationship with his people. Its dynamic is sometimes explosive, at other times pedestrian, but it leads us from our past, to Jesus Christ, our present and our future.
And this is what St Paul is pointing out in today’s second reading from the Letter to the Romans. He invites us to get real and to keep on getting real. The reality he is talking about is that, although baptised persons, we are still human, persons who suffer, die, doubt, wonder, sin, betray, love, aspire and expire. But, as baptised persons we also share not only in Christ’s death, but also in his resurrection. And that reality is the great and challenging game-changer. Death no longer has dominion over Christ and so no longer has dominion over us.
This reality while focussing us on being alive for God in Jesus Christ, as today’s gospel puts it, does not divert our focus from the concrete realities of our earthly, human, existence. Christ is not telling us not to love mother or father, son or daughter. He is not telling us not to love, notto try to love, the neighbour who is a pain in the neck, hard work or simply plain bonkers.
What Christ is telling us, inviting us to and making possible for us, is to look at and beyond present realities to the great reality of his saving person, one of us, human, but also God. This focus on the wider reality beyond and out of time, makes sense of all our focusses on and in time.
In a way, we are all, male or female, barren. The miraculous births we recall, remind us of God’s power to bring life and hope where there is barrenness and despair.
Myself the rose you acheive—-
This body,
This ivory.