Enjoy Alan’s message this festive season
Dear All
Balaam, local seer and, for the appropriate consideration, provider of blessings and cursing, should appear on Christmas cards once in a while. You may remember the story. Balak, King of Moab, wants a good bit of malediction and curse for the Israelites. They’ve landed on his doorstep, and he’s worried. He calls upon Balaam, who promises God only to speak as God instructs him. However, by the time that Balaam saddles up his donkey, he has already changed his mind and decided for Balak’s cash, which sparkles enough to blind him.
Consequently, he doesn’t see the angel blazing on the path in front of him. The donkey, of course, perfectly sensible and with 20-20 vision, does see the angel. She shivers and whimpers, twisting from one side to the other, anywhere but to face the angel. In a fury, Balaam strikes his donkey. She squashes him against the wall by the path and then collapses in a shuddering heap.
The enraged prophet saw nothing and heard nothing, though there was enough light on the road from that one angel to make a second sun. Then the donkey speaks, which donkeys do not, as a rule, do, “Why are you beating me?” she says, “Have I not obeyed you every inch of every way? Is it not possible, even remotely possible, that you may have missed something? That you are deaf and blind to what is under your nose.” Only then did Balaam see the angel and hear the voice of God. The prophet had his heart in the wrong direction and missed what was right before him.
Through a very different prophet, God calls, “Oh, my people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you? Answer me!” Jesus repeats this grieving appeal to Israel, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!”
God cries out to Israel and to us. God does not invite, he demands, begs that we hear his word. God wants to school us into a common mind with him, so that our distracted and violent hearts might ease in reconciliation with God’s heart, as in the garden once, walking in the sharp evening light, understanding everything.
This is why Jesus encourages his disciples, “the Father… will give you another Counsellor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth. …the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” Jesus does not, therefore, leave us to puzzle out his words, casting about dimly and desperately for this and that fragment of sense, of what might or might not be God’s meaning.
The eternal Word breathes the Spirit, so we see more clearly the little bit of creation God has given us – that is to say, our loves, our burdens, our neighbours, our duties, our callings, our work, all that local reach into the world with which he has entrusted us. Here we come to school, to learn the mind of God. Then what delights the Father begins to delight us also, what the Father desires we start to long for, too, and what pains the Father, sorrows us as well.
The Spirit attunes us, and the Word of life gains our attention, here and now, hinting, calling, demanding, persuading, whispering. Even in our sleep, the Word speaks and the Spirit lights. “Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.”
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” In the beginning, in other words, eternally. The God who is the entire beginning of anything and everything and always, is not dark or blind or ignorant of himself.
God speaks Himself, knows and loves all the fullness He is. God’s eternal Word, the perfect mirror of God, who rejoices always while the Spirit binds the Father and the Son in a love too strong for heaven alone. What Jesus would teach us, if we would but listen, is nothing less than this mind of God, the love that would find its expression in our struggles and hopes and pains.
The Word that speaks and the Spirit that lights, speaks and lights even the very depths of God. Might we, too, know this? How is that possible? Paul asks. No one knows God but God’s own Spirit. Quite so, but remember, through the Word in whom the Father eternally speaks his mind, God expresses himself in our flesh and blood, in Jesus, whom we recognise and understand, then, since God’s gifts always overflow themselves, the Word sends us that Spirit, here and now, so that we may, boldly and in wonder, say nothing less than that we have received the mind of Christ.
With prayers for a joyful Christmas celebration.
