Readings: Exodus 17:8-13, and Matthew 6:25-33

The journey of the Israelites from bondage to the promised land is a human story, one which teaches us that in the world we will encounter troubles and battles not of our own choosing – facing challenges that can be unpredictable, feel chaotic, fearful and at times inflict harm. Their movement, like our own, begins in the world of the visible. A wandering through time to find the place that God wishes us to be, a place of life, and love.

War creates such deep trauma to the whole of our nature and yet so many are still having to live through its devasting effects, the passing on of the memories of death and destruction rather than those of life. Yet it is of nature to find a home and protect the life we have been given.

The battles we face now in modern times, are both ancient and new, physical and spiritual because we are grounded in nature yet have been invited to live with a heavenly King. The lines are drawn with the limits of our perceptions and awareness of self. Just as Jesus wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane, so we too wrestle with the calling to give our lives completely to God for His will not our own. When Jesus was before Pontius Pilate He said, “If my kingly authority derived from this world, then my servants would fight.” Jesus recognises the spiritual forces for good and for the evil at work in the world; the wicked that delights in disrupting and tempting us to fall away from our heavenly pursuit within and without.
Jesus was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognise Him. (John 1:10).

As sensory organisms, the perception of this existence through our consciousness is the internal place that responds and directs this sacred adventure of learning to make sense of who we are in relation to all that is external to us. This coordination between brain structures and sense experience is intuitive, unconsciously directing us towards survival that is ‘safety-seeking’.

From the moment of our birth, we are set on a voyage of discovery, of finding the person we were created to be. A journey that is not simply an expression of our genetic inheritance, but a complex interplay of this nature and our nurture in the environment through which we move and have our being.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided,” as the principle of natural law. So let us consider for a moment a simple predator-prey relationship between a fox and a rabbit. Is the rabbit fleeing from evil when it runs from a fox? It appears logical to say yes, however the death of the rabbit is a good for the fox – does this make the fox evil? I say not, for God saw all that He had created and called it good. We can instead reason that when the rabbit flees and when the fox pursues, both are in fact chasing life. The unconscious basic needs necessary to sustain life are good in themselves, therefore needs must be separated from desires, and it must then be desire that takes humans to the possibilities beyond these natural goods.

Death as the end of life is a perception defeated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The life we are given flourishes, like nature in balance, which is the harmony of all things working together for each other. All that was created has facilitated in some way the stability necessary for this flourishing of life on earth. Without the coming together of a multitude of ‘just so’s’ we would not have the conditions necessary to exist.

Life therefore is a consequence of a whole. A chain of events like a staircase leading us to that life which thrives as a complex web of interdependence between the animate and inanimate. The drive to destruction is to be distinguished from death itself, though the end is the same, the means to this end are not, therefore destruction as a goal is not a natural one. Destruction can be likened to an explosion of parts, or a scattering of sheep. Matter separating itself in this way is like the drive towards individualism. Individualism is therefore not of nature itself as it tends toward anarchy, a state we think of as existing prior to creation. Science tells us that the created order of life evolved from life and this life seeks to continue from generation to generation like a dance through our perception of time.

We remember God is Himself a community of being, and that in Him is life and His life is the light of humankind (John 1:4). In belonging together, dancing through life together, we mirror His goodness as people who look for and journey towards the other. We have however, a tension between being human and unique, that tension between sameness and difference. A tension created by our sense experience, a product of our seeing in a world of lines, shapes and shadows, a world of appearances inextricably knit to a different reality hidden in the realm of the invisible, perhaps the quantum, and the spiritual.

But God created us to inhabit this world of appearances, therefore the perception of outward difference in itself is not a crime, it is the attachment of meaning we give to the observation which leads us to sin against our neighbour. The difference we perceive becomes a gap between us when we believe that difference. In part because our brains are wired for survival, they seek safety in similarity, wondering ‘who are you in relation to me?’ ‘Are you safe?’ But ‘is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?’

Survival requires resources for the fulfilment of basic needs: food, water, air, shelter and so on. Where humans have reshaped the environment and domesticated animals, we see the development of interspecies friendships of predators and prey that no longer need to fight for territory or hunger for food, they seek social bonding through touch, and play.

Competition is a natural phenomenon, but God in setting us apart from the animals has given us faith and reason so that we may go beyond our nature to the good that is to seek Him so that we may participate with all our imperfections in His perfect love.

The psalmist writes, God ‘makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth’, and Isaiah declares with God ‘swords are beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’ (Psalm 46:9, Isaiah 2:4).

The change point is within us. The desert fathers and mothers knew that re-arranging external landscapes does not drive the re-shaping of our interior. In our thoughts, in our words and in our deeds, we work towards the recognition of our common physiological and psychological needs, needs recognised by our Father in heaven. We feed ourselves, how then if the other is us, and we are they – how can we tend towards the excesses of modern society for ourselves but not seek the basic welfare of our other?

Moses held up his hands and the battle was won, his whole being was offered to God, a sacrifice of praise directed heavenward, yet he was not able to do this alone in his own strength. Aaron and Hur with Moses as mediator between God and man, are like an earthly trinity because no-one is saved alone.

‘I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.’ (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Jesus has defeated death. He has changed our perception of finitude; death is not the end. In Him we belong to a greater reality than the one which we see.

Each human being is more precious than any jewel, our embodied soul an infusion of God’s breath, our hearts the meeting point between the material and immaterial. “Do not worry about your life,” Says Jesus, and St Paul writes ‘In everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.’ (Philippians 4:6-7).

Where love works, it embraces all our fears, it encircles them until that empty space gets smaller and smaller, and eventually disappears. Fear therefore is not something we can absorb – it has to be filled. In love, fear in annihilated, it exists no more like a hole in the ground that is filled. For us, peace is the extension of God to ourselves, and the other which cultivates the fruits of the Spirit. Our joys and our freedoms are the product of His peace.

Yet our minds are like embodied memory maps, like roads that remember in our seeing all that is past. Our brain, directed towards survival likes to ‘fill in the gaps’ of our encounters, setting up conflicts with what is in the world with how we think the world should be. The conflict of ideas and ideals in the mind with what exists external to us.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have laboured in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.”

This is why prayer matters so much, not to get want we want as a transactional relationship between God, self and other, but to change us, to transform that internal landscape. In prayer, in peace we find that sense of belonging to the moments when we inhabit the stillness of our soul. In peace we hear the call of the eternal. Therefore, peace is our common goal, the end to which we are directed.

If we depend on God, who is the light that comes from above, we will be like the leaves on the tree of life, our fruit for the healing of nations. For transformation begins within us, and like a pebble dropped in a pond, the ripples spread outwards from the cause – that is from the person to the family, to communities to our physical and virtual connections around the world.

Each of us to some extent is wounded by life’s trials, yet we continue to love because God is love and His love never stops flowing towards us, like a liquid gold that fuses the broken pieces together, more beautiful in our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, to become wounded healers in a world of hurt.

Amen.