Loreto Year of Justice: Standing with Jesus

Ms Kerry McCullough | Chaplain
 

By the tender mercy of our God
the dawn from on High will break upon us
 

We are coming to the end of our Loreto Year of Justice. We began the year with an invitation to consider justice as stewardship: a call to care for, to be responsible for, to expand the parameters of our kinship. We saw that to truly care for others, and indeed all of creation, we need to listen to their stories, enable them to have a voice, recognise the inherent dignity of all and do what we can to enable flourishing so that all might have that fullness of life of which Jesus spoke. The question, of course, is how might we go about that and expand the parameters of our stewardship? What might we do? What is asked of us? How do we put this call into practice? To do that, we turn to an Ignatian teaching known as The Two Standards.   

St Ignatius himself developed this teaching of the two standards. He spoke of them as the standard of Jesus on the one hand, and the standard of Satan on the other. Language around Satan is not something we relate to today, but if we put it into contemporary, relatable terms for the modern ear, and we again turn to Ignatius, we can speak of the standard of Jesus or the way of Jesus as poverty, humility, lowliness, and the standard or way of Satan as the way of riches, honour, pride. Ignatius refers to this latter as the enemy of our human nature. As he says, we have two options, and we have to choose!

The Jesuit Father Greg Boyle says that it’s all about recognising the strategy of Jesus and then, ourselves, embracing the disposition of his heart. The strategy of Jesus, he says, is where he positions himself, where he stands. So where does Jesus stand?

There’s a beautiful song by a contemporary group that we use a lot here in our liturgies and these few lines from it perfectly capture the strategy of Jesus:

You’ll find me with the broken and the weak
And the spaces in between
You’ll hear my voice cry out with those who weep
Only if you’re listening.

In the Spiritual Exercises Ignatius says: Consider Christ our Lord standing in a lowly place. It’s a choice, but it’s about location. He is standing with those on the margins, those who are voiceless, powerless, denied dignity, and burdened. And Ignatius prays: “Place me with your Son”. In other words, stand where Jesus has chosen to stand. This teaching invites us to make that location our location and to allow our hearts to be broken by the very things that break the heart of God.

When we allow our hearts to be touched and broken, when we place ourselves there and when we stand there, we begin to expand the parameters of our kinship in a very real way. Justice, stewardship, by its very nature, involves us. And so, we find ourselves on a journey. There’s risk in that because we might be changed. When we stand with others, we might find our sense of who we are, and who the other is, quite shaken up. 

Peter, that great friend of Jesus who walked with him, who stood alongside him, who promised to follow him wherever he went, was also the one who so often got it all wrong and he had to learn that, in fact several times. To stand where Jesus stood meant giving up some of his hard and fast rules of how to look at the world. In that well-known scene where Jesus knelt at the feet of his friends during their last meal together and washed their feet, taking on a servant’s role, Peter struggled. He wanted nothing to do with it. It wasn’t proper, it wasn’t the custom. And Jesus had to point out to him that he had to position himself with Jesus on this. Stand where I stand, is what he was saying to Peter. He had to draw Peter into his strategy. And then the ever-enthusiastic Peter threw himself into it! 

As it was for Peter, we may be asked to see the world anew, to embrace a new perspective on our relationship with others, whoever and wherever they might be. We may find we are challenged in some of our clear-cut divisions of the world into good and bad, who is good and who is bad. We may be invited to refrain from judgment and to stand in awe of the burdens people carry rather than in judgment of how they carry them. We will certainly be asked to look at everyone through the eyes of compassionate love.

Next Sunday, we begin the Season of Advent and with it we enter the new Church Year. Advent is a time of waiting, listening, preparing our hearts, as we wait upon the Light and listen for the sometimes still, small voice calling us to welcome that Light. Advent invites us to choose again, to be faithful to the vision of a world that God will recognise. We imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonised so that the demonising will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. 

The ancient Hebrew prophet Habbakuk writes: The vision still has its time, presses on to fulfilment and it will not disappoint. And if it delays, wait for it.

May Advent be a blessed time for us as we stand in faithfulness. And may we stand there long enough until there is a community of kinship such that God might recognise.      

By the tender mercy of our God
the dawn from on High will break upon us
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death
to guide our feet into the way of peace (Luke 1:78-79).