Here the author asks the poor widow of Sidon through Elijah to relax into the universal care God wants to take for the whole earth. “Jar of meal shall not be spent…before the day when the Lord sends rain on the face of the earth.” Divine bounty has to be shadowed by human generosity and hospitality. Divine dialogue with humanity calls forth the best in humanity – in Sidon long before Christianity – but everywhere now amongst those for whom Christianity is unknown but where God’s bounty is reflected in human goodness.
In Hebrews we find the outrageous and culminating end result of the Divine – Human dialogue. The dialogue of God and Man meets in Christ and his sacrifice and the division between earth and heaven is shattered once and for all. It is remarkable that such an epoch-making event – the only really true and totally mind-blowing epoch- making event in the whole history of creation, since time began – sufficient to be described as a new creation – can be framed in the simple phrases of the author. Yet the epoch-making reality is so simply described: “Christ entered heaven itself, so that he could appear in the actual presence of God.” What for? What for? “On our behalf.” “On our behalf!” This is so monumental a teaching or description that it stops the heart and mind in their tracks, or ought to! Christ is the culmination all that needs to be said in the dialogue between Man and God. Christ has said it all and our task is simply now to play our part in the dialogue so that when Christ appears “a second time, it will not be to deal with sin but to reward with salvation those who are waiting for him”. And yet the waiting is also a time marked by the continuation of the dialogue which was completed when Christ ‘entered heaven’. We take up the echoes of the final Word between God and Man – we repeat the words of the completed dialogue so that all humanity can feel themselves caught up into it. This is the waiting time task –the glorious living out and completion in our lives of the great proclamation – that God has spoken His last word in Christ. Now the purely physicality of Jesus of Nazareth is transformed into the Word of God seen to illuminate and shine forth in every human goodness, The Cosmic Christ in every culture, time, nation, creed and person. The Holy Spirit of that final dialogue between God and Man in Christ now finally and forever vaunts forth without any check or hindrance able to vanquish it. If time and space began with the original Big Bang – then the new creation began with the sudden super-nova explosion of the meeting of God and Man in Christ as he entered the heavenly sanctuary through the sacrifice of the Cross. No additional word can or need now be spoken. In a great all-enveloping silence, the dialogue arches out like solar flares from a brilliant sun to the ends of the universe. “It is finished”. Christ speaks the last word from the Cross. All now we do and say is either to ratify and connect or not to this final word. We exist to manifest that final word of dialogue – to bring it to completion with all humanity. This is or can be our service of love to all that exists. God is completed in our witness to this final word of dialogue. We find our destiny in repeating the word by our living and being.
Jesus speaks the final word using the example of the poor widow. She seeks to witness to what Jesus will sum up soon in his body and his death. She gives her all – the pennyweight of two small coins – to the worship of God. She is a fore-runner of all those who give their all as witness to the Divine invitation to enter a dialogue which demands humanity’s full presence and giving – as reflections and imitations of the total giving of Christ.
The lessons here are not of our making but have come to us only because of the living dialogue which takes place between God and humanity. We might not have come to any realisation of such a dialogue and its nature as inclusive of all humanity – unless a man one day watched a poor widow in Jerusalem outside the Temple and his followers recorded what he said. He was able to say what he said because the dialogue had gone on for hundreds of years prior to that day and he was the inheritor of its transmitted and culminating wisdom. The dialogue was becoming wrapped up into its perfect personification and activity – Christ and his death. The dialogue’s final act was gathering force.
The task of Christians is to retrieve the original universality and inclusiveness of the wisdom which culminated in Christ (The Dialoguer) and somehow strip it of the accumulated and cloying debris of two thousand years of obfuscation. (See Cardinal Montini’s dying statement made in 2012) Christians should so present the final dialogical words of the drama that they affirm. They need not negate but affirm the experiences and insights of all those human beings who seek the truth, holiness and goodness through whatever creed or philosophy. So often the Christian Churches seem to encourage the growth of tendencies which repel the good man and women of our age who are not Christian. If only all Christians ‘spoke’ to all a message of ‘good news’ and avoided shrill declamations. An insecure grasp of their own ‘salvation’ may lead them to condemn all outside the fold! As an awareness of the need for a non-dual mind grows, so may Christians ‘put on the mind of Christ.’ and prefer the stance of ‘both…and’ and leave ‘ether…or’ behind.
