“Those who
look to the Lord will win new strength, they will soar as on eagles’ wings.”
Part of the last verse of today’s first reading, from chapter 40 of the
Prophecy of Isaiah.
There are
no longer any eagles in these parts, but there are other slightly smaller birds
of prey whose soaring flight can thrill our hearts. Not long ago, on a morning
of driving snow, the clouds cleared and the sun suddenly shone, and all at once
there were three buzzards wheeling above the churchyard in which I stood, in
Selattyn; their mewing cries echoed across the snow and their bronze wings were
glowing in the sun. Two days earlier, on a grey and misty morning, my heart was
lifted by the sight of a pair of red kites display flying as only kites can do,
masters of the air, as I piloted my car up the bank between Trewern and
Middletown. Aren’t we lucky to live in such a beautiful part of the world!
And isn’t
there also something deep within each of us that longs to possess that same
mastery of the elements, that same ability to rise up above the everyday and
the mundane, all the stuff that constantly conspires to drag us down. Our feet
are like lead; and our wings don’t seem to work at all; it would be easy to get
depressed.
On our own,
we can’t escape the ground. On our own, we get tangled up in things, not
managing to untie the knots. But those who look to the Lord, says the prophet
Isaiah, will win new strength; they will win from him a strength beyond any
strength they can train up within themselves, and it will be as though they are
flying. But here’s a thought: those who fly on eagles’ wings need also to be
able to see with eagles’ eyes.
Watching
great birds of prey, and marvelling at the way they seem able to control the
air: buzzards hardly moving a wing muscle as they ride the thermals, kites
rolling and tumbling, seeming almost to tumble out of the sky altogether, but
then recovering and soaring back up there . . . you could imagine they’re doing
it just for the sheer pleasure of it all, just because they can – and maybe, to
some degree, that’s true. But these are also serious hunters, and from their
lofty vantage points in the sky, there isn’t much they miss.
A golden
eagle flying high above some Scottish glen may be hardly more than a speck in
the sky; but his eyes may well be fixed on a ptarmigan or a mountain hare far
below, too far for your eyes or mine to find focus. If we’re raised up on
eagles’ wings we’re raised up to see further, to serve better and to do more.
Those who are raised on eagles’ wings are raised up to praise, to proclaim and
to preach. And for this we need not only the wings but the vision of eagles.
The witness
of Paul is that where praising, proclaiming and preaching are concerned, he
cannot help himself; this is what he has to do. I Corinthians chapter 9 verse
16 – “It would be agony for me not to preach”. It’s in the intrinsic nature of
an eagle that it should soar and fly and hunt; for Paul, claimed and chosen and
changed by Christ in such a dramatic way on the road to Damascus, it’s second
nature now to praise and proclaim and preach his Lord wherever in the world he
goes. This is his destiny; this is what
he must do.
So too the
church of today must be soaring and flying in order to fulfil its high call: to
praise and proclaim and preach must be second nature to us as well. We have
good news; we don’t have to be stuck to the ground; we can fly. That’s not just
our good news, it’s good news for the world.
In many ways
I like the Gospel of Mark more than any of the others. I’m not sure why, maybe
just because it’s probably the earliest to be written down, and it has a
simplicity and directness about it which appeals to me. I think that’s
particularly true of the beginning; the band of disciples is newly formed, and,
as they travel around the lakeside towns and villages of Galilee there’s a
sense in which all of them, Jesus himself included, seem to be sort of finding
out just what it is they’re supposed to be doing as they do it. Or that’s how I
read it, anyway.
Perhaps,
for example, Jesus hasn’t yet begun to think of his mission as being beyond the
bounds of his own part of the world – Galilee. He has yet to take the road to
Jerusalem; he has yet to take the road to the cross; he has yet to take the
road that will lead him out into all the world. Events and things said seem to
provoke a new sense of his Father’s call. So here, it seems that it’s when the
disciples say to Jesus, “Everyone’s looking for you” that Jesus then tells
them, somewhat unexpectedly in my view, that it must therefore be time to move
on.
Do you
share my surprise at that? Jesus needed quiet times like the rest of us, and
that’s where he’d gone, very early in the morning. No-one else was up, and when
they got up, he was missing. And folk were already gathering at the door; so
Simon Peter went off to try and find him. Well, of course, he was praying.
“Everyone’s looking for you,” said Peter . . . and what I’d have said, maybe
with something of a sigh of resignation, would I think have been along the
lines of, “Well, all right then, I suppose I’d better come back with you, see
what we can do.” But Jesus says, “Let’s leave this lot, and go and preach
somewhere else.”
Vision, you
see; seeing the bigger picture, seeing with the eyes of the Father. It might be
very plausible and tempting to become the personal rabbi and healer for the
people of Capernaum, but this is a message and a mission for more than
Capernaum. For now, the message is still just to Galilee, not yet beyond, not
yet to Judea and Jerusalem, not yet out into all the world. But that will come;
once you have mounted up on eagles’ wings, then there are no limits to your
vision.
So there
you are. There are no limits. There is no “play it safe” option for the people
of Jesus. We have been claimed and saved and transformed by a limitless love;
how can we keep such good news to ourselves? And if I am to be raised up like
an eagle, to float and soar high above the earth, it isn’t so that I can be set
free from the earth with all its evil, but so that I can see more clearly what
has to be done, and have the confidence and the courage and the love to play my
part in telling the story, in passing on the word, in praising and proclaiming
and preaching.
Jesus
wasn’t turning his back on the people of Capernaum; indeed, it wasn’t long
before he was back there and people were once again beating a path to the door
of the house where he was staying. But nor was he, or his message, their
possession; God’s love is for all the world to know, and no-one is excluded.
Just recently, I’ve found myself agonising more than a bit about why it is that
religion should be such a force for division and hatred within the world. God’s
love is always inclusive, never exclusive: that is the essential message of the
Gospels, and for Christians all scripture should be read and understood and
used in the light of the Gospels, and our image and idea of God and of what he
might want from us constantly measured and tested against what we see in
Christ, and what we hear him say.
A simple
measuring-stick that was shared with me a few weeks ago goes like this: “If it
ain’t like Jesus, then it ain’t God.” Paul wrote that “God was in Christ,
reconciling the world to himself” – and that’s probably the one sentence of
scripture that means most to me. When we look at Jesus, we see God in action,
we see the love divine, all loves excelling, revealed in this man, in this
human life, at this moment in history.
It’s human
nature, sad to say, to divide into tribes, to take sides, to make gods out of
your own sort and to demonise the others. There’s such a lot of that going on
the world around us as we speak. And before we’re too quick to label any one of
the great religions as mostly to blame, let’s be honest enough to admit that
Christians have not been immune from the temptation to tribalism or, for that
matter, triumphalism. But that’s not the perspective when you look with the
eyes of an eagle; that’s not the perspective when you look with the eyes and
understand with the mind of the one true God, and of Jesus Christ in whom all
the fullness of his love is revealed.
There’s a
bit of a difference between an eagle and a dove, but none the less the church
has often wanted to link that prophetic promise of being able to be lifted up
as though on eagles’ wings with the gift of the Holy Spirit. I think it’s a
good link to make. If we have the mind of Christ, and a godly view of the world
is formed within us, then that’s surely the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s the
presence of the Holy Spirit that nerves and prepares us for mission and
service, and that gives exactly what Isaiah is talking about – a strength and a
courage beyond our own. It’s for this reason that we know that however dark and
desperate the world may seem, we have no cause for despair and every reason to
hope.
So: we are
promised the ability to fly, or at least, to be spiritually renewed, refreshed
and lifted up. And that’s not just so that we can feel good, nor is it a reward
for our own marvellous goodness, but God’s gracious and undeserved gift given
us to use, given so that we can serve him and proclaim him, so that the world
may know his truth because of the love we bear and show and share, which is his
love inspired within us.
And my last
thought? I wonder what it feels like for one of these masters of the air, when
the time comes for the young bird to take its first flight? You see them
perched on the edge of the nest, not knowing whether they dare trust their
wings. Eventually they do. Maybe the parents have to cajole them, perhaps by
not bringing food to the nest but instead perching a little way off where the
young bird can see.
It would be
a sad thing if the young bird failed to fly; a bit of a waste of potential and
power, and of the effort the parents had put into it all. What stops us from
flying? Are we too timid, do we feel too small and weak? As the hymn reminds
us, we have a gospel to proclaim, and we’ll not do that by staying safely on the
nest. That would be a waste of God’s grace, and a sin of omission.
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