Читать книгу Witness - The Faith and Order Commission - Страница 8

The webpage mentioned above says that ‘A witness is someone who simply says … what they have seen and heard for themselves.’ The first thing to note about this definition is that, for witnesses, the seeing and hearing come before the saying.

‘Seeing and hearing’ aren’t restricted to our literal eyes and ears. They involve all of our senses, and all of our understanding – the whole process by which we notice what God is doing, and are captivated by it. ‘Hear, O Israel!’, ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good!’ ‘We declare to you … what we have … touched with our hands, concerning the word of life’; ‘thanks be to God, who … spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him’, ‘so that … all may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this’.3

Whether they are literal or metaphorical, however, this seeing and hearing come first. Before we say or do anything, becoming a witness is something that happens to us.

Think of Moses in the desert, tending his father-in-law’s flock:

There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight.4

His attention is caught by something, his curiosity aroused, and so he turns aside to look more closely. It is then that he is given the role of speaking about God in the world, and of accompanying that speaking with action. That role is based on what he has seen, and on his turning aside to look more closely.

Or think of the women who went early on the first Easter morning to Jesus’ tomb, to tend to his dead body.

They found the stone rolled away from the body, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.’5

The women were made witnesses because of what they unexpectedly found – and what they still more unexpectedly did not find. And on that basis they were commissioned to spread the good news. They were asked to bear witness. The whole Christian church through history is the gathering of those added to the community of these women: the community of witnesses.

To focus on witness means placing our own action in second place. Our action emerges from what we have seen and heard – from what we have been shown and told; what we have found.

The message of the women at the tomb, and of the other witnesses whom God has added to their number, reaches us through Scripture. It reaches us through the worship in which we learn to inhabit the story they passed on. It reaches us through experiences of the Spirit working in the life of the church to lead us deeper into the truth of this story.

All the stories of witness that we tell in the case studies below are stories that involve people who have been shown something in this way: who have been fed by Scripture, shaped by worship, and led by the Spirit.

There is a second sense, though, in which they are stories of seeing and hearing before they are stories of doing. In different ways, each of them is a story of people who pay attention to the world around them. With ears and eyes shaped by all that they have been learning about God, they look closely at the people and situations around them. They look for the opportunities, the resources, the gifts, the challenges that God has placed in their path. They listen out for the sound of God already at work in the lives of those they meet. They see the work of God, blazing unexpectedly beside their path.

The work of witness is never simply our own initiative. It is always a response. It depends completely on what we have received and go on receiving, on what we have been shown and told and go on being shown and told, and on what we have learnt and go on learning.