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The stumbling-block of a hard saying

by
05 January 2018

Write, if you have any answers to questions listed at the end of this section, or to add to the answers given below

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Your answers

“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters . . . he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14.26). What would readers say to someone who insisted that, if those were the conditions, he could not possibly be Jesus’s disciple?

 

In Semitic languages, the verbs usually translated “love” and “hate” have less to do with personal affect than they do loyalty and rebellion. We must bear in mind that these difficult words of Jesus are ad­­dressed not primarily to modern-day readers but to would-be followers in a particular context.

Jesus predicts the fall of Jeru­salem in AD 70, and is reconfigur­ing God’s people away from the Temple regime and around his person. His call to renounce family is a call to break with the prevailing nationalist ideology, which advo­­cated a violent showdown between Israel and her enemies. It is lang­­uage apt for a time of imminent political crisis rather than settled life in Jewish or Chris­­tian communities.

Even so, these words of Christ chal­­lenge his followers today to break radically from unchristian ideo­­logies (racism, misogyny, na­­tional chauvinism), even if this means community or, indeed, family rupture.

(The Revd) Chris MacBruithin

Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh

 

The Hebrew idiom means love less than rather than hate (cf. Matthew 10.37). God’s rule must have ab­­solute prior­ity (Matthew 6.33). The first commandment is to love God not with a good proportion, but with all we have and are. We must remem­ber that Christ gave his all for us on the cross. Love so amaz­ing, so di­­vine, requires my life, my soul, my all.

(Canon) John Goodchild, Liverpool

 

Our relatively new vicar has chan­ged the words of all the week­day services so that they are now those of the Roman mass. . . We have always been Anglo-Catholic, but never Roman. What can we do, please? [Answers, 1 December]

 

Changes are often made by new incumbents which carry no legal significance but can upset people sometimes by the way in which they are introduced, and sometimes by their resonances in the minds of those who fear change. If a priest introduces a change, whether at a PCC meeting or from the pulpit, there may be an implied claim to authority, which may also suggest that previous ways of doing things, much valued, were somehow wrong. Courteous people often find it hard to resist, whatever their personal views.

My view is that it is wrong to ar­­rive at a parish with an agenda al­­ready prepared. Some parishes have experienced a series of new incum­bents, each with his or her recipe for growth, each different from the previous one. The reverent way in which any service is conducted, the faithfulness in exercising the pa­­s­toral ministry, and the engage­ment in the complex task of teach­ing the faith may count more than singing the Sursum Corda, using the Roman Canon, or grinning at every­one while wearing a polo shirt.

The ministry of honest recon­cilia­­tion when conflicts arise, and truthful humility in dealing with them, may matter just as much.

(Canon) R. H. W. Arguile
Wells-next-the-Sea
Norfolk

 

Your questions

 

Would it be legal, from an Angli­can point of view, for a Roman Catholic priest to preside at evensong in an Anglican church? J. F.

 

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