Texts :Isaiah 50:4-9a; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38
It’s not widely known that William Shakespeare once had a mad idea. He had long wanted to write a play about his favourite biblical character, St Peter, but he feared the power of the Church. So he wondered about disguising the play in some way and that’s when he had the mad idea of changing the setting from Galilee to somewhere completely different such as the Scottish Highlands, for example, and changing the name of the hero from Simon Peter, which would have been something of a giveaway, to something Scottish like, MacBeth.
Of course, being the great genius he was, he soon realised just how mad the idea was and he abandoned it – except for one or two elements which survived into the revised version of his great drama. In particular, the witches. Remember those wonderful old crones who muttered their highly ambiguous messages into MacBeth’s all too susceptible ears? We learned this week they’re still around, only these days they use email. “Go on – you know you want to be king , really. Just roll King Bill – it’s for the best.”
It’s not only the mentally disturbed who hear voices. We all do, inside our heads as well as outside – the voices that suggest things to us, voices that encourage us and urge us on – persuasive voices that speak to our needs, our desires, and our weaknesses. Someone has said that a good advertisement works by echoing something we dare not say out loud.. One of the all times classics is the line from L’Oreal – “Because I’m worth it.” MacBeth would have been a sucker for L’Oreal products in happier times!
Isaiah would not. We have the classic antidote to the wiles of witches, political plotters and advertisers in our first reading this morning, and it’s an important lesson for us all. It asks us, in effect, a simple question: whose is the first voice we listen to? And it’s interesting that the question comes from one of the greatest of all the prophets – people who, by definition, are remembered for speaking rather than listening. Isaiah, like all the prophets, was a spokesman for God; but first he was a listener to God.
It was to God’s voice that Isaiah listened each morning on waking. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught. It’s a wonderful insight into the life of the prophet. He doesn’t listen to his body, as the modern saying has it, or to Morning Report, or even to his much loved wife and family! He listens to God, and God becomes his teacher, his instructor. For that reason Isaiah is able to describe his own tongue as “instructed”; it’s not just that he knows what to do, he knows what to say to others. He knows the word that sustains the weary.
It all sounds a little romantic, idyllic – but not for long. What these early morning sessions listening to God are for is to fortify Isaiah for the trials and tribulations of the day ahead. For he goes on to give us another insight into his life as a prophet, and a scary one it is, too. I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting. Sounds a bit like Question Time in the House, doesn’t it?
And here’s an important thing about Isaiah’s daily quiet time with the Lord. Even though he knows what lies ahead of him, he is not asking the Lord to deal to his persecutors, or to make them better people, to shut their mouths. He is letting the Lord deal to him, to make him a better person, to give him the words to say. Nothing here about retaliation – about dishing dirt on opponents – about two playing the same game.
Nor is there anything here about maintaining a sulky, or even a dignified, silence. Isaiah is listening so that he might be taught what to say. Which gets us to one of my personal heroes of the New Testament, St James. He was no poet – not even a very good prose writer. He was not great thinker – made virtually no contribution to theological understanding. But, boy or boy, did he understand human nature – did he see us as we really are – and did he see through the cant we are all capable of wrapping ourselves in! Shakespeare should have written a play about him!
Today’s diatribe against the human tongue is a classic. I’m never sure if he had someone in particular in mind. I used to think that perhaps he had a grandmother or an elder sister like mine, but in my older and wiser years I think maybe he had a tongue like mine. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might suggest he was writing about St Peter, but I’m not so I won’t.
Whatever the case may be, St James is clear about how necessary and how difficult it is to tame the human tongue. In fact, at one point he says it is impossible to tame it. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by people, but no one can tame the tongue. (Steve Irwin comes to mind!) He thinks of a horse with a bit between the teeth, a ship steered by a small rudder, and of a spark causing a great forest fire. The tongue, he sums up, is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
Then a thought strikes him. Actually, the peculiar thing about the tongue is not that it is entirely evil, but that it can be used equally easily for good and evil. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. Which leads him into yet another couple of images, of salt water and fresh water flowing from the same spring, and trees bearing the fruit of another tree.
Overdone as it is, the point is clear enough; we tame the tongue not for silence, but for saying the right thing. It’s a lesson St Peter took a lifetime to learn. Today he perfectly illustrates what St James was saying.
When Jesus asks his disciples directly, ‘who do you say I am?’ St Peter gets it gloriously right. In this account from St Mark, he says simply, “”You are the Christ.” St Luke reports it in much the same terse way. But St Matthew records a joyous response from Jesus. ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.’ In Isaiah’s terms, St Peter has spoken his profession of faith with an “instructed” tongue.
Contrast that with what happened next. Having declared Jesus to be the Christ, St Peter then refuses to listen to him. Jesus explains that he is to be condemned and killed and so on, and Peter won’t have a bar of it. He takes Jesus in hand – literally – takes him to one side, as St Mark puts it, and rebukes Jesus! Jesus in turn rebukes him in the most stinging terms imaginable: ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ he said. ‘You do no have in mind the concerns of God, but human concerns.’
And there we have it. Peter was listening to the wrong voice. It may sound hard to call it the voice of Satan, but any voice that leads us to act contrary to God’s will could be called that. At the human level, we might find it hard to see the nature of Peter’s offence. Who among us does not protest at the thought of a friend suffering? Who among us does not pray for healing for the sick and suffering?
And yet, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he gave them a template that makes no mention of illness or suffering. He taught them to pray that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven. There we see the nature of Peter’s offence. He had not listened so he did not know that it was God’s plan to let human sin go all the way to the cross, not to intervene to save Jesus from the cross. He had not listened so he was not speaking right. As so often with Peter, it would have been better if he had kept his mouth shut.
We often say that we should think before we speak. That’s good advice, no doubt, but the Bible’s take is slightly different. It teaches that we should listen before we speak, even, and perhaps specially, in prayer. Lord, teach us to pray, the disciples asked. We do not know what to pray for, St Paul tells us. Perhaps, instead of telling God what we want, true prayer is about asking God what he wants.
And listening for his answer. Why? Because he’s worth it!
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