Matthew 10:26-33 (NRSV Updated Edition)
“So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. Everyone, therefore, who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven, but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.”
Romans 5:12-15 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— for sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam, who is a pattern of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.
Romans 6:1-4 (NRSV Updated Edition)
What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.
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"“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” In other words, don't be frightened of those who are out to get you, they will they won't it doesn't matter. What you really need to be afraid of is going along with them, believing it, allowing your soul to be destroyed as well, because then you're completely worthless, then you are cast into Gehenna.
...
"“So do not be afraid, you're of more value than many sparrows.” In other words, be able to trust the fact that you're loved and you'll be able to stand up to all this nonsense of those who are up to get you, those who make you frightened, those who seem to have locked you into a place of closed-ness where you can't get out.
"And notice, this is not just something that's incidental to Christianity, this is what is absolutely the heart of Christianity: Jesus has come in our midst by going to his death, showing the lynch mechanism, the scapegoat mechanism, the human sacrificial mechanism up for what it is. He's in the midst of that, standing triumphant and saying: look it doesn't shut us down! Come and take part in the opening up with me.
"“Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven.” Learn to stand with the lynched one. It can't run them and it can't run you. If you're able to do that, you're automatically flying in heaven, you're no longer a caught sparrow being sold for a tuppence, you're a flying sparrow worth much much more. “But whoever denies me before others I also will deny before my Father in heaven.” That is, take part in the lynch mob, take part in that in the whispering, in the gossiping, in being the group that makes its goodness over against someone condemned, [and] you have taken part in the very reverse of what I'm all about. So no, stand free.
"That's the gracious gift even St Paul in the passage to the Romans [5:12-15] talks about, the same thing. The sin of Adam was one thing, some sort of disobedience to the law, but the free gift of the real Adam - the Adam of whom the first Adam was merely a type - the free gift is so much more than that. It was not really putting right a law, it was coming into our midst to undo the whole of the sacrificial mechanism by which we build ourselves up - including all its lies, its gossip, its fake accounts, its far too quick resolutions of things - to enable us to stand free and not to be frightened, to learn to speak freely, to think healthily and to be able to work out what this creation is that we are in and how we can best participate in it."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 12 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We1zx16qSKM)
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"In Paul’s letters, the approach is not “do X, and then you will become Y,” it is rather, “Because you are finding yourselves X, so do Y.” ...
"The understanding is pretty clear: something happens that takes us somewhere quite new. As we find ourselves on the inside of the new life, allowing our imaginations to be rejigged, so the ways of behaving which flow from that new life become second nature to us, and we are able to ditch those which don’t flow from that new life. It is what we are becoming that is first, and the transformation of our behaviour which flows from that.
"This makes sense to me: it is as I discover myself on the inside of a new way of being that I discover the sense, and the richness, of different ways of behaving. And indeed, we find ourselves on the inside of discovering for ourselves quite why these new ways of behaving correspond to the richest and deepest loving intention for us of our Creator. In other words, there is something genuinely exciting about learning to be fascinated by a goodness we didn’t know.
"And this of course has been the whole burden of [what I want to share]: how it is that someone coming towards us, and into our midst, catches us by surprise and enables us to be turned into ourselves-for-each-other, something much richer and more zest-inspiring than we could guess while we thought we knew who we were."
- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pp. 523-24
[Source of quote from James Alison's book Jesus the Forgiving Victim, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_7a/]
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