When Miriam met Elisheba

Have you had a holiday recently? The Covid-19 pandemic has put that on hold for a lot of us over the last year or so. For many who have managed to get away, it's been somewhere rather more local than normal. Whether you've been able to get abroad, go somewhere nearby, or been cooped up for months on end, we all have times when we need a break, whether it involves going far or not. It might just be to refresh our minds routinely once or twice a year, but ocassionally there are other compelling reasons to escape normality.

When Miriam found out that she was pregnant, but not married, she had to find someone who understood. Perhaps her parents wouldn't. Her fiancé, who wasn't the father, might have an even bigger problem with it. Her cousin, Elisheba, on the other hand, was also pregnant and had a similar story to tell: although she was married, she was well beyond normal child-bearing age. So Miriam packed her bags and travelled south to the hill country of Judah to stay somewhere safe with someone who wouldn't judge her (Luke's Gospel, chapter 1, verses 39 - 56).

Of course, in England we normally know Miriam as Mary and Elisheba as Elizabeth. They had both had their pregnancies announced by the angel Gabriel, and it was he who had alerted Mary to the fact that Elizabeth was also expecting a baby. Elizabeth was clearly going to be the person to go to while Mary got her head around the situation. When they met, Elizabeth's baby recognized that Mary was carrying the baby Messiah, and both women were filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied. So this was a meeting which God had his hand on, but other than that it wasn't seemingly a major happening. Why, then, did Luke consider it important enough to include in his Gospel, in which he missed out a lot of other events, and why does the Church even include it in its calendar?

Clearly, Luke 1 gives us the Magnificat, when Mary erupted into praise and thanks to God. Elizabeth confirmed who Jesus was, and so did John the Baptist, even though not yet born, so this helped to build up the story. These are all perhaps functional outcomes, though. What do we learn about our own lives?

Firstly, Mary needed somewhere safe to go. Once she was there, she was free to be herself and pour out her soul to God in the presence of someone who understood. We can sometimes become too isolated as Christians. Even if you do attend church regularly, do you have Christian friends who understand when you need somewhere to hide, or want to shout out to God? Do we too often feel that church means being 'proper' in some sort of Victorian sense or with a stiff upper lip. Mary was an excitable and, at the time, vulnerable young Jewish lady, at least with regard to her present position in society as an unmarried mother. Perhaps the Bible is giving us a role model here which wouldn't fit in a lot of our church gatherings, but is important in teaching us to be ourselves in the presence of God and our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Another lesson is that children can experience God. John the Baptist, being unborn, wouldn't have been able to articulate that he knew he was in the presence of God, but when Mary walked into the house, bearing Jesus, he was fully aware in his Spirit that something amazing and greater than him had arrived. How often do we hive off our children out of the more spiritual aspects of church to send them to their own groups where they can learn the basics first? Yes, it's good for children to learn together with their peers and have structured programmes of teaching, so that they come to understand what Christianity is about. However, those groups should also involve teaching them to pray, commit their lives to God, be filled with the Holy Spirit, listen to his voice, operate in the gifts of the Spirit and more besides. Let's not assume that children have to be grown up before they can be proper Christians. The disciples were rebuked by Jesus for having a similar attitude (Matthew's Gospel, chapter 19, verses 13 - 15). If we need to approach God as children (Mark's Gospel, chapter 10, verse 15), then that means that children can do so as well, or even better than adults. If God is turning up in power in the main meeting, let's get the children in, unless he's also doing the same with them in another room!

For me, this passage by Luke is about those marginalized by society having a role to play and being released to do that. Eight years old, 80 years old, married, single, rich, poor, male, female, Jew or Gentile, the Church needs to provide the safe place for everyone to be accepted and grow in God.

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A tale of three loves

A few days ago we had a bank holiday in England, essentially because it was the last Monday in May. However, in the calendars of many churches, the day before that was Trinity Sunday, which seems a good enough reason to have a day off. Thus begins a long series of Sundays known simply as the 1st Sunday after Trinity, the 2nd Sunday after Trinity etc, right through into October. We keep hearing and seeing the word Trinity, over and over again for months on end: Trinity, God is three, God is one, God is relationship. It is such an important concept because it's at the heart of the life of God as a life of love, but it receives relatively little attention.

God is beyond our understanding; he is incredibly complex. One of the most difficult things to understand about him is that he is one God but three persons. I posted here about that last year, as well as about making sure that we relate to the whole of the Trinity. However, today being at the start of that season again, it's worth thinking afresh about who God is as a relationship. At the end of the day, that's what the Trinity is all about: even on his own, God has to relate; even though his nature is vastly too intricate for us possibly to comprehend, he wants us to know him.

God is love. To love you have to have an object of your love, someone on whom to lavish your affection. Therefore, by virtue of his own nature, when God was on his own he had to be more than one person. The love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is perfect and the model that we have for our own love. It was a love which overflowed beyond the Godhead because it was too great to be contained. It needed other objects for its affection and so God created, to give himself other things to love. How he feels about animals we have largely to guess, although he gives indications that he clearly has a least concern for them. However, he made people to be like him, formed in his image, not gods ourselves, but reflecting the key essences of his nature. In us he has companions who understand his love in the way that he does and who are able to love him back in the same, albeit lesser, way.

No wonder our God, Yahweh, for he has told us his name, was so distraught when Adam and Eve disobeyed him and the intimately close relationship which mirrored that within the Trinity of the Godhead was lost. When he had to cry out, "Adam, where are you?" God's heart must have been not just broken, but torn asunder (Genesis chapter 3, verses 8 & 9). No wonder he had to find a way to reconcile us to himself; no wonder that he was willing to risk breaking the bond of the Trinity to achieve that.

Or perhaps it is a wonder - wonder of wonders that God, in all his glory, should choose to go through the rigours of becoming a man and dying as one in order to save us, rather than just wiping us out and starting again. The whole of the Trinity was involved in this: the Father was willing to part with the Son and have to live with Jesus somewhat at arm's length while he was on Earth; Jesus, the Son, was willing to become human and be crucified with the guilt of all our sin upon him, ultimately being abandoned by both his Father and the Holy Spirit at his lowest point physcially on the cross; the Holy Spirit also had to be willing to endure this separation from Jesus. They did it because God is love; God is relationship. Yahweh could have destroyed the human race, perhaps completely this time, not like when he saved Noah and his family at the time of the Great Flood. But the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were in a love relationship with us and lovingly, together, put together a plan which they were willing to work on as a team, to be able to restore our intimacy with them.

So let's not concern ourselves for now about how a trinity can exist, but rather revel in the fact that such an amazing, complex, almighty God with the whole of Heaven and Earth at his disposal, as well as the ability to create anything else that he wants, should choose to redeem the seriously messed up human race by sacrificing the fundamental core of his nature - the unbreakable intimate relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Godhead that is Yahweh.

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The substitute

Have you ever watched or even played in a football, hockey, rugby, netball or any other kind of match involving teams, when a substitute has come on a turned the game around? Perhaps he or she scored the winning points when all had seemed lost. Do you think that that person complained at the end that it wasn't fair not to have been on the pitch at the start? Maybe sometimes that's appropriate. Perhaps it's someone who has come back from injury and now felt able to complete the whole game. It's possible that the situation wouldn't then have become so dire in the first place. However, sometimes it's important to have someone ready to come onto the field late in the day, have almost no time to get into the feel of the game and know how to use fresh legs, and perhaps arms as well, to change things around. He or she may be involved for only a few minutes, but ends up lauded as the match winner.

As soon as the 11 remaining apostles returned to Jerusalem after Jesus had ascended to Heaven, Peter realized that there should be 12 of them. Therefore, they chose a replacement for Judas Iscariot. After praying and casting lots, they appointed Matthias. Many Christians probably wouldn't be able to tell you his name, even if they can those of the other 11. He didn't feature prominently in Acts, but he was there at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the believers and he became one of the principle 12 Church leaders who oversaw its birth and inital growth. We know that that growth was phenomenal owing to the yielded and inspired lives of those 12 men, as well as other leaders, together with the enthusiasm of the new converts. Leadership, though, can facilitate or stifle. In this case the leaders got it right - one of those leaders was Matthias.

I've known people who've been appointed to a post as second, third, or even fourth choice and go on to do a stunning job. I've also know people refuse to accept a job offer because they've found out that they were not first choice. We know that Matthias had been prominent in the wider circle of Jesus's disciples from the time when John was baptizing (Acts of the Apostles, chapter 1, verses 21 & 22), but he hadn't been chosen then to be one of the 12. Yet he was ultimately deemed to be a disciple of a calibre to join the table with Simon Peter, James and John the sons of Zebedee, as well as Andrew, Matthew Levi, Philip, Nathanael Bartholomew, James son Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas Thaddeus, and Thomas Didymus. He decided not to turn down the offer.

Pride can be a terrible thing. It can stop us from fulfilling our true potential because we weren't recognized when we wanted to be or by the person whom we had hoped would spot our potential. Matthias humbly accepted that he hadn't been one of the 12, but was willing to step up to the mark and, if the opportunity presented itself, score the winning goal.

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