A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

June 2019

I’ve been thinking about the Beatitudes recently. Luke’s version sounds simpler and thus more original. ‘Blessed are the poor, the hungry and those who weep’.  After his baptism we are told that Jesus was led into the wilderness for a time.  He must have been poor: there’s no indication in the Gospels that he ever earned his living and he’d squandered his inheritance. So he knew what poverty was, and he must have wondered as he pondered the call he heard at his baptism, ‘how is this going to be funded?’   He must also have known hunger in the wilderness: there was no food to be found there. Its not difficult to imagine that he spent time weeping there too: both tears of repentance at his attempts to avoid God, and tears of joy at knowing himself forgiven. The temptations that we are told that he faced there speak to these words too. The temptation to rule the world and become rich, to turn stones into bread to release his hunger, and to call on God to perform a miracle as outward proof of his forgiven and accepted status.  So Jesus knew all about the realities of poverty, hunger and sadness. He also knew, from experience, that they were the source of blessing for him.  So he was able to speak the Beatitudes from deep personal experience. I suspect much of his teaching came from the same source.

Why do I think all this is so important?  

I believe that ‘the God Whom we already know’ is the God whom Jesus of Nazareth knew.  

I believe that what John’s Gospel says about Jesus, namely that he was with God from the beginning, that he laid that down to be born as a human being, and was then returned to God at his death, all that is also true of each of us too. 

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth/the Risen Lord/the Cosmic Christ has shown us that this is true, and that this is the core of the Good News of the Gospel. 

I believe that we are called to imitate Jesus of Nazareth, by heeding whatever God calls us to be and do, as he did, by trusting our own experience of God as he did, by trusting the Risen Lord to guide and uphold us, and by trusting that the Cosmic Christ is present in everyone and everything we meet .     

What’s different about Jesus of Nazareth, is his calling, his vocation. Each of us has a distinctive vocation from God that no-one else has. Jesus had a distinctive vocation and fulfilled it. So do each of us, and our task is to fulfil it as well as we are able.