Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest
 (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
God’s us
My friend Henson loved his high school Latin class, several semesters of it. I took four years of French, so when we watch Poirot on TV with subtitles I generally know what the words mean. Bien sur, mademoiselle. But Latin surely would be more useful.
Com-passion, for example. Com means “with” and passion means “suffer, “so compassion begins by suffering with someone. Henri Nouwen says simply that “Jesus manifests to us that God is a God who suffers with all of us.” Paul writes to the Philippians that Jesus “emptied himself, made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, becoming obedient unto death.”
This does not sound like the same God described in Joshua or Judges, Yahweh who punished leaders for their leniency against enemies. Kill them all, they were told by God. Explanations aside, Jehovah can be seen as having a taste for blood which Jesus did not have. Love your enemies? Jesus staked his ministry on statements like that. And he saw Jehovah as his father, his Abba, and insisted that we see him that way too, through his eyes.
Brothers and sisters:
As you received Christ Jesus the Lord,
Walk in him, rooted in him and built upon him
and established in the faith as you were taught.
For in him all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form,
And he is the head over every power and authority.
Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them,
Triumphing over them by the cross.
Jesus dwells in the spirit world as well as on our physical earth. What we don’t see well beyond our body, he sees clearly. Paul calls what Jesus accomplished a “public spectacle.” Imagine the chaos and fear of the spiritual powers and authorities when Jesus put on his armor of God.
Now, filled with the Holy Spirit we take up our own positions, because “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6). But usually what we end up with is one more war against each other.
Jesus insisted that as humans we love each other as we love ourselves. We must love our enemies, and they must love us. None of us live perfect lives that we can brag to God about. Seeing someone else as evil doesn’t make me good. The differences we have with each other are grounded in fear and self-protection. Yes, it’s crazy to imagine not protecting my loved ones by attacking their attackers. But to God all of us are his loved ones, and when we forget that each of us “loved ones” must see the world like Abba-Father, we fall fast. There are no borders to God’s us.
Saint Peter Claver, seventeenth century missionary and minister to slaves in Colombia, baptized 300,000 African slaves and heard thousands of confessions each year. But when he died, the white slaveholders honored him with a great funeral. Some of the slaveowners, at least, knew that Peter loved them too.
The LORD is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and of great kindness.
The LORD is good to all
and compassionate toward all his works.
The Wikipedia article about Peter Claver documents his last four years, “too ill to leave his room, largely forgotten, physically abused and starved by an ex-slave who had been hired by the Superior of the house to care for him. He never complained about his treatment, accepting it as a just punishment for his sins.”
There is something about silence in the face of persecution that Jesus calls us to, and I think that after the bitterness and desire for revenge that might come first, patience and mercy follow, and in this way heaven comes to us on earth.
Even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured.
Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him
because power came forth from him and healed them all.
(Colossians 2, Psalm 145, John 15, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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