Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”  

Matthew 10.34

WHEN JESUS OF NAZARETH speaks the message of Christ to us through the Gospels, he speaks with Hebrew and Aramaic poetry and story-telling techniques and nuances. He wastes no words and every word he does use has the power to reverberate in the heart of the listener, and enter the soul before the brain even begins its limited and laborious attempts to catch up and quantify what it thinks it has heard. It is for this reason that we must come to Scripture first with the heart, in contemplation, letting ourselves be steeped in small portions of it at a time, like in the ancient Christian practice of Lectio Divina.

    Jesus does not expect to be taken literally. All words are metaphors. They are never actually the thing or idea they point towards. Of course, we are not to “hate” our mother or father or sister or brother, as Luke puts it even more forcefully than Matthew’s version. However, our parents, teachers, ancestors, friends, colleagues etc, though they may love us and value us unreservedly, have passed on to us their own unconscious, semi-conscious and undealt with fears, prejudices, sadnesses and false beliefs as well as some of the potentially wise things they would like to have imparted.

     As we continue to climb within ourselves the metaphorical holy mountain of Matthew’s Gospel, there necessarily comes a time when we have to cut the cord that holds us to those inherited and assimilated influences. Only in returning to the Source, to discover the holy temple on the holy mountain of our true selves can we find the Wisdom we really need, in which Love can flow like living water in and through us, and so out into the world.

     Christ does not hold out to us a soporific, religious image of meek and mild niceness to plaster over our wounds. Christ brings us the sword we need to cut our true self free from the cowering ego that pretends to be “me”.

~ by Fr Tim Ardouin on June 19, 2020.

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