Week 15 Monday (Year 1)

Readings: Exodus 1:8-14, 22; Psalm 124; Matthew 10:34-11:1

The 'shrewd' strategies devised by the new Pharaoh are not original. Across the centuries we see tyrants and oppressive regimes engaging in all the things he decides to do in his mistreatment of the children of Israel, subjecting them to what the reading calls 'the whole cruel fate of slaves'. Even the final atrocity, the killing of all their newly born boys, brings to mind the later persecution of boys by Herod in his panic to eliminate the boy who is to be the King of the Jews. It is a logic that is all too familiar.

The psalm jumps ahead to the moment of the liberation of these slaves. Like a bird from the fowler's snare, the people of Israel are brought out of the land of Egypt, and they sing of that liberation: 'our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth'. Just as the creation is the first moment in the story of salvation, so the great acts of redemption are always new creations. It is the same Lord whose power is engaged in the one as in the other, in all acts of creation and in all acts of redemption.

If the logic of Pharaoh is tragically familiar, the logic of the sayings of Jesus recorded in today's gospel is much more difficult to understand. The one we celebrate as the Prince of Peace, who comes to establish a kingdom of love, justice and peace, says that he has not come to bring peace but 'the sword'.  He has come, he says, to set one against another, to sow division in families. And if someone who wishes to follow him loves a parent or sibling more than he loves Jesus then he is 'not worthy of him'. To find your life is to lose it and to lose your life for his sake is to find it.

The last part of his sayings is gentler and easier to comprehend: receiving him, or a prophet, or a righteous person, even giving a cup of water - all such acts will merit a reward.

What kind of shrewdness is operating in the first part of those sayings? what kind of wisdom is this? Matthew's gospel tells us that these sayings are 'commands' of Jesus, directing his disciples as to how they should live. It is easy to see how the command to receive people worthily and to treat them kindly is of Christ, the command contained in the second part. But what of the first part? There he is speaking of the attitude or disposition that is necessary if the good deeds of the second part are to have their true significance as the acts of people who are really following him.

It is the 'logic of the cross', a kind of 'divine shrewdness', which aims at the most radical liberation of all, freeing ourselves from ourselves. He calls his followers to find their identity and their sense of belonging most radically, most fundamentally, in Him. So it means finding our identity and belonging not in the first place in family and the relationships it values, but in the freedom to remain faithful to Jesus no matter what comes and no matter what the impact of that faithfulness on all our other relationships and commitments. Otherwise to find my life will be to lose it, because my true life is to be found only in Him. And so to lose my life for His sake is the way, truly, to find it. And with Him to find all those relationships and commitments again.

The fowler's snare, the hunter's trap of egoism is the most subtle and shrewd of all because it can put even our noblest aspirations at the service of its own concerns, to fix us on ourselves and to keep us fixed on ourselves. Whereas the cross is the key that opens the door of this trap and allows us to emerge, not without suffering and struggle obviously, but into a new light and a new life, into a new creation.