Week 22 Saturday (Year 1)

Readings: Colossians 1.21-23; Psalm 53; Luke 6.1-5

It might seem strange to us that the title 'Son of Man' was more potent for Jesus's contemporaries than the title 'Son of God'.  Israel was already the son of God, God's adopted. Prophets and kings, and sometimes the entire people, were referred to in this way, in the psalms for example: they were already sons and daughters of the Lord, the God of Israel.

For Jesus to refer to himself as the 'Son of Man', however, was a bigger claim in the context in which he lived and preached. In the Book of Daniel, a recent and influential text of the Hebrew scriptures, the Son of Man was a heavenly figure, whose task was to appear on earth in the last days to inaugurate the kingdom of God, God's reign, alongside the earthly powers that came and went. No wonder, then, that the Son of Man would be Lord of the Sabbath, since he was the one to inaugurate the rule of God, the kingdom of Shalom, the promised rest.

The first reading, from the Letter to the Colossians, complements the gospel in this way: it reminds us that the Son of Man's inauguration of the kingdom took place not through any show of physical force, not through any military or political power, but in the scandal of the crucifixion of Jesus. God has reconciled you, Paul says, by Christ's death in his mortal body, in another translation 'in the fleshly body of Christ through his death'.

It is not a philosophy or a spirituality that saves the world. It is saved by a sacrifice which establishes within the world's history a love that originates in God and into which we can now be adopted in a new way, so as to be sons and daughters, friends and kinsfolk, of God, no longer strangers, aliens or enemies.

The new Sabbath, the new Kingdom, is for all people. The way to enter is through faith in the Son of Man who loved us and gave himself up for us. We are to walk in the same cornfield - 'walk in love', Paul says in Ephesians 5.2 - loving God and our neighbour with the same sacrificial love made possible for us by the Spirit of the Son of Man. Wherever that love is found, the Kingdom of God is there.