The Essential Cat

 

Texts: Deuteronomy 4:12, 6-9; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

One of the great spiritual teachers and writers of the 20^th century was a man called Anthony de Mello; and I've long treasured his story about a priest and his cat.  The priest's cat had developed a love of human attention, and had discovered that if he turned up when a service was going on in the chapel the congregation would soon pay him more attention than they were paying to the priest.  (The same thing happens today if a baby is present, or a bird flies in.  Any welcome distraction will do, as long-suffering priests will tell you.)

Anyway, the time came when the priest decided he had had enough of this cat disturbing the service, so he had a cage put up the front of the chapel; and every time the cat entered the chapel during a service, the priest would catch the cat and lock it in the cage until the service had finished.  Both the priest and the cat were long-lived and between them kept this practice up for years; but eventually the priest died.  After that the senior lay person became responsible for catching the cat and putting it in the cage, until the day came when the cat also died.  Even if you haven't heard the story before, you can probably guess what happened next.  Yes, the congregation got another cat, because in that congregation everyone knew that it was a necessary part of a service of worship to have a cat in a cage!

That story for me exactly captures the temptation we are all capable of falling into of thinking that what we have done for many years must be essential to worship.  I was once roundly criticised by a colleague for extinguishing the candles on the Holy Table in the wrong order.  He wasn't being helpful, trying to guide a new, inexperienced priest to do things in the proper manner; he was furious with me for spoiling our service!  I remember, too, the outrage inadvertently caused by the organist at All Saints, Palmerston North, who decided on one occasion, for very good musical reasons, to play one of the hymns on the piano instead of the organ.  This prompted the justly famous line from one of the senior women of the parish, "If the pipe organ was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ, it should be good enough for All Saints, Palmerston North"!!!  And, of course, in fairly recent times, there was a period when the Church seemed more interested in ensuring that the readers and preachers used gender-inclusive language than that they read the right passage and did not preach heresy!

In today's gospel passage we find a classic example of this tendency to give too much importance to the trivial details, and forget the essence of what we are supposed to be about.  Some Pharisees have arrived from Jerusalem, which tells us that they are probably a sort of audit team, sent by officialdom to check out what Jesus is doing and saying.  Jesus, of course, has been saying and doing a lot by this time, all over Galilee, drawing huge crowds and amazing the populace with his miracles and his extraordinary teaching.  But this official audit team pays all that no attention.  It's not his teaching or miracles that they find upsetting.  Rather it's the failure of his disciples to carry out ritual hand-washing before having a meal that has called down their wrath.

Which is strange, for all sorts of reasons.  First, this has got nothing to do with personal hygiene: this is not a public health issue.  It is about a requirement to render yourself ritualistically clean before eating, because eating was a sacred act – it began with thanksgiving and a prayer for blessing, and you couldn't do that with unclean hands.  The second thing that is strange about that is that this requirement is not to be found in the Law: it is found in what we today would call "case law", or, perhaps, "legal commentary".  Sometime in the past some learned scholar of the Law had said that it was necessary to be ritualistically clean before eating, even in the privacy of one's own home, and that ruling had become accepted by the Pharisees as part of the Law.

We've had a wonderful example of this sort of process in recent times in this country over the physical disciplining of children.  The basic rule in this area was an obvious one: no one must assault anyone else.  But what is an assault?  Well, said the Law, it is the application of force by one person to another.  Had we left things there we might have saved ourselves a lot of angst.  In principle, we all agree that we shouldn't go around assaulting people.  But it happens all the time.  If I tap someone in the street to attract their attention so I can ask them if they can tell me the time, that tap is an assault.  I am guilty of an offence.  So is every player who comes into contact with any other player during a game of rugby, soccer, hockey or netball.  So is a surgeon who operates on me.

But none of us would expect a prosecution to be brought in any such case.  We would expect everyone to rely on commonsense.  We know what we mean by assault, and we don't mean tapping someone on the shoulder, or tackling them in the course of a game, and we don't mean anything properly done by a surgeon in the course of removing someone's inflamed appendix.  BUT...somewhere in the past someone raised the specific case of a parent applying force to a child, and of a surgeon applying force to a patient, with the result that specific defences were written into the law for those cases – but not, be it noted, for the tap on the shoulder or the rugby tackle.  Once we decided that the general principle, backed up in practice by commonsense, was not enough, we opened the floodgate for the sort of rampant Pharisaism that we are now experiencing.  Less than two years ago, our leaders changed the wording of the law, and now they are intending to issue guidelines to explain further how the law is to be administered.  and so it grows and grows.

We've been going through a similar practice around the administration of Communion.  Throughout, the intent has been good; our Bishops have sought to modify our practice in a way that minimises the risk of spreading swine flu among participants.  But we have now found ourselves paying more attention to the act of receiving Communion, rather than to the meaning and effect of receiving it.  I found it particularly weird (to use a mild term) to be receiving missives about how to wash my hands before the service and sanitise them before touching the wafer, and how to wash the chalice after the service, while we were reading our way through chapter 6 of St John's Gospel, which includes his teaching on Holy Communion itself.  And having finished that, I return to St Mark to find this argument about washing our hands before receiving food!

Perhaps the fundamental error the Pharisees of all generations make is to forget that the Law is given for our good; it is given so that we may live long and well in our own land.  It is to guide us along the way, not trip us up every time we stray.  God gave the people the Law out of love for the people; and Jesus gives us his teaching for the same reason.  Parents love your children and care for them to the best of your ability.  That's what our Law should be understood to mean, surely.  Leave it to the Pharisees among us to split hairs over what that means in each and every particular case.

And when we come to Communion, let us remember that it is given for our spiritual health and well-being, and stop obsessing over whether we dip the wafer, drink from the cup, or receive only the wafer.  It's the gift that matters; everything else is wrapping.

On a par with the cat in the cage.

Putting Theory into Practice

Texts: Isaiah 35:4-7a; James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37

Last week we got the theory – this week we see the theory being worked out in practice.  This whole chapter 7 of St Mark's gospel is about the division between Jews and Gentiles – Israel on the one hand, and everyone else on the other.  That attitude is not peculiar to the Jews, of course.  I have a copy of a very old map, which claims to be based on "divers explorations and discoverations of English and foreigners in recent times".  My Grandmother was slightly more broad-minded than that.  She used to talk of "British and foreigners".  And I remember a former colleague who assured me that people were either Ngati Porou or strangers; for him that was the important distinction – not Maori and Pakeha.

So the fundamental starting point for Jewish belief was that they had been especially called by God; and it was necessary for them to remain separate and distinct as a people.  There was to be no intermarriage with Gentiles – no social mixing – and no eating together.  And whenever that separation was threatened, those who were most zealous for the house of Israel became ever more insistent on those marks of the distinct Jewish way of life, including, of course, the dietary code and all the ritual that surrounded the eating of a meal.  We saw all that last week, when the Pharisees asked Jesus why his disciples did not observe the correct ritual practices relating to hand-washing.  That argument came to an end with Jesus seeming to abolish the dietary code altogether: he insisted that it is not what we eat that makes us unclean, but the thoughts of our hearts.

And that posed a great difficulty for at least two of our gospel writers, St Mark and St Matthew.  (It's interesting that neither St Luke nor St John has this story.)  The difficulty for them is that they were writing their gospels to prove that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah; and every good Jew knew that according to their Scriptures the Messiah would come to the House of Israel, not to the world at large.  He would bring redemption (salvation) to the House of Israel.  It's true that from the time of Isaiah onwards there was a recognition that this would somehow be good news to the Gentiles as well, but it wasn't always clear quite how this would work out in practice, and it didn't really matter.  What mattered to the Jewish believers was that the Messiah would come and redeem Israel.

There's the problem for St Mark and St Matthew.  How is it to be explained that, by their time, the Christian gospel was being accepted by Gentiles far more readily than by Jews?  How were they to record Jesus' own interactions with Gentiles, if he was the Messiah and had been sent only to the House of Israel?  We can see their answer to that problem in this fascinating and disturbing story of the Canaanite (or Syro-Phoenician) woman this morning.

As I said earlier in the year, when St Mark tells us the geographical location of a story we need to take note; because what he is usually doing is to tell us whether the story is set in Jewish or Gentile country.  So both these episodes today are set in Gentile country, the first in Tyre, in the Phoenician hills (modern day Lebanon), and the second in the Decapolis on the eastern side of the Lake.  In the first story St Mark is at great pains to spell out that the woman who comes to Jesus is a Gentile: he says she "was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia" (which is also very interesting, given the Syrian influence in Lebanon to this day!). 

As usual, St Mark cuts straight to the chase.  He leaves out the important preliminary that St Matthew puts in.  According to St Matthew, Jesus' first response is to ignore her: he has nothing to say to the Gentiles.  Then the disciples join in, suggesting that he should tell her to go away.  Then Jesus spells it out: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel."  Only after that does St Matthew give us the sharp thrust and counter-thrust that St Mark has in his version.  In both versions Jesus uses the clear insult: Gentiles are dogs.  Even today, to call someone a dog in the Middle East is grossly insulting.

And down through the ages Christians have been embarrassed by this text, which seems to show Jesus in such a harsh light; and Bible commentators have gone to very inventive lengths to explain it away.  My favourite is the one who claimed that the word Jesus used was not "dog" but "doggie", which might soften the insult a bit but at the cost of making Jesus sound condescending if not plain barmy!  The more favoured approach is to suggest that Jesus is simply testing this woman's faith, but there is nothing in either text to support that approach.

More likely, this is the way St Mark and St Matthew wish to show that Jesus' starting-point, as the Messiah, is with the Jews, and only after that is his mission to the Gentiles as well.  And, of course, the basis for the Gentiles to come to him is faith.  As St Paul puts it, salvation is for all, the Jews first and then the Gentiles.  After all, St Mark has Jesus say, "First, let the children eat all they want", the implication being that after the children have eaten others may eat, too.

However, the really important thing about the way this story is told is that it gives a strong hint that Jesus' understanding of his mission as Messiah was growing as he went along.  And, what a wonderfully liberating story it is for women!  A bunch of men have been to see Jesus over the behaviour of his disciples and he has routed them in argument.  Now this lone, desperate Gentile mother has come to him and apparently won him over.  Next time anyone tries to tell you the Scriptures are hopelessly patriarchal and anti-women, rub their nose in this story – either version will do!

St Mark follows this story with another healing story, this time of a man who is deaf and unable to speak easily.  Again it is a Gentile, and that may be one reason why St Mark spells out the procedural details involved in the healing.  Jesus touches the man, which would make him ritualistically unclean.  Probably, this is also about proving Jesus is the Messiah because much of the language in this story is taken from Isaiah's messianic prophesies, including the one we have in our first reading this morning.  Jesus the Messiah casts out demons, heals the deaf and empowers the mute to speak again.

And we should note that the hearing is healed first.  Only when the man can hear properly is he able to speak plainly.  That's probably to be understood on the spiritual, as well as the physical, level.  Only when we have heard God speak, should we presume to say anything.  Again, Jesus urges the crowd to keep this to themselves, and of course they take no notice.  The problem of his fame and popularity getting in the way of his ministry is a common theme in St Mark's gospel.

So we have had the theory and now the practice, and that gets me to one of my favourite authors of the Bible, St James.  If there was a prize for the clearest piece of Scripture his letter would bolt in!  To him it's all very simple.  Don't play favourites.  Minister to the needy.  Walk the talk.  Now get on with it.  No need for conferences and seminars and mission statements and all the rest of it; just do it. Despite his critics, St James does not deny that faith in Christ is essential.  What he says is that true faith is manifested in action.  It is not enough to believe that the hungry should be fed; we must actually feed the hungry.    As he puts it, "faith by itself, if not accompanied by action, is dead".

And no amount of hand-washing will make any difference to that.

Prepare to be Unpopular

Texts: Ezekiel 2:1-6; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:14-29

I've mentioned from time to time that a friend of mine is doing some scholarly work on the theological implications of the holocaust.  He sends me some drafts and I send back some comments, and so on; and one of the things I have urged him to do is to think about the holocaust in terms of the exile to Babylon.  We think of the holocaust as being uniquely horrific, in part, because it took place in living memory – it's part of modern history – the wounds from it are still very raw.  Think of the furore that ensues whenever any prominent person casts doubts on the holocaust.  Would there be the same hue and cry if an historian doubted that the exile to Babylon took place?

But if we place ourselves back at the time of the exile – if we put ourselves in the shoes of the Jews of that time – would it have seemed any less terrible than the holocaust seems to us today?  What could be worse than your capital city destroyed, your temple pillaged and left in ruins, and your people – those who had survived the siege and then the slaughter that followed defeat – carted off as prisoners by the invading army?  Wouldn't it have raised some of the same questions about the providence of God for those people as the holocaust does for the people of today?

And here's where things get worse.  Suppose a prophet were to arise in Israel today and started to tell the people that the holocaust was all God's doing, and they deserved it because of their disobedience to God's Law  How would that go down?  But that's exactly what happened at the time of the exile – not after it was all over and the remaining exiles had been set free – but while the exile was still in force.  That's precisely what we are dealing with in our first lesson this morning.  Although scholars can't agree on the exact dating of this episode, because the dates given don't exactly add up, it is clear that Ezekiel's vision and call came to him in Babylon – in exile.  And his calling was to do exactly what I have just been talking about.

He was to tell the exiles that they had it coming to them – that it was God's way of punishing them for their disobedience.  No words of comfort or reassurance here.  No words of regret.  No words of hope.  Just blunt words of condemnation and a call to repent.  And I say it again, to get some idea of the force of these words, transpose them to the context of the holocaust – it doesn't bear thinking about, does it?  Yet this was Ezekiel's calling, and the message he was to preach.

No wonder he was warned that the task would not be easy!  He was told that the people were stubborn and rebellious – perhaps they were – but wouldn't they have some grounds for it?  Might they not be wondering where their God was when the Babylonians came calling?  Don't we often feel most like questioning God when something has gone disastrously wrong?  We can't match Job's eloquence, but we understand his feelings!

However, we have started Ezekiel's story in the wrong place today.  We have literally started in chapter 2, with him lying face down in the dirt.  We need to remember why he is lying face down in the dirt.  He is lying face down in the dirt because he has just received the most amazing vision of the glory of God – not in the temple where Isaiah received his – but there in exile in Babylon!  The God of Israel has not stayed behind weeping over the rubble that was once his holy resting place; but has gone with his people into exile.  That's the wonderful news – the good news – that is given first to Ezekiel.

And what does that remind us of as Christians?  The resurrection appearances of the risen Christ, doesn't it?  All was defeat and hopelessness on Good Friday – where was God when this terrible thing happened – when our enemies prevailed?  Has he abandoned us?  No, here he is – he has raised Jesus up – put him back on his feet by the same Spirit that lifted Ezekiel back to his feet.  That's what makes the good news good – not that all opposition has been vanquished – not that everybody is now a believer – but that belief in God is once again made possible.  Ezekiel saw God and believed despite the exile and all the terrible suffering associated with it; Mary Magdalene and the disciples saw the Risen Christ and believed, despite the terrible suffering that reached it's conclusion on the cross on Good Friday.

With that confidence in God, Ezekiel was able to carry out his mission to his fellow exiles, to call them to repent, to call them to turn back to God.  And the same is true of the Christian message.  At the time of Christ the people had reason to feel sorry for themselves.  They were in their own land, of course, but under foreign domination.  In a real sense, they felt exiled from God.  Yet when that great prophet, John the Baptist, appeared he brought no word of comfort or reassurance.  He brought the same message Ezekiel brought; repent, turn back to God.  Was his task any easier than Ezekiel's?  Were not the people of his time every bit as stubborn and rebellious as those of Ezekiel's time?  Jesus found them so.

And so did St Paul; and when we think of him, suddenly we hear those echoes again of that earlier story of Ezekiel.  Like Ezekiel, St Paul finds himself face down in the dirt; like him, he hears a voice calling upon him to get up and get going.  Like him he is to go to forth and proclaim God's message.  And like him, he will find himself facing every conceivable form of hostility and opposition.  But he never wavers, because he has seen the Lord, he has heard him, and so his faith is made strong.  As the God of Israel was with Ezekiel in Babylon, so he is with Paul in Corinth and all the other Gentile, unbelieving places in which Paul finds himself.

And the pattern is the same in the gospel reading.  First comes Jesus, who builds up the faith of the disciples in him; and then he sends them out into the disbelieving world, knowing that they too will face hostility and opposition.  They do their best and meet with some success, but something is missing.  The Spirit has not yet come upon them; they have not yet been clothed with power from on high.  They have not yet seen the vision of one like a Son of Man raised up.  But when they have – when they have seen the risen Christ – when they have been empowered from on high by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost – they are unstoppable.

And they have one great advantage over Ezekiel.  The exile is finally over for ever.  In Christ, God was reconciling himself to the world.  That's how St Paul put it.  He might just as easily have put it in terms of the restoration, the return of the exiles to the holy land.  We are no longer estranged from God.  We have been set free to come home.

That's the message the Church has been given to proclaim to the stubborn and rebellious people of our time.  Of course, we face hostility and opposition – at least, we would do if we were true to our calling.

But compared to Ezekiel, we've got it easy.

Hard Line on Holy Communion

Texts: Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

We are now on the fourth leg of our journey through chapter 6 of St John's Gospel, and we have covered a lot of ground.  When we started out four weeks ago we did so with one of the best-known and best-loved miracles, the Feeding of the Five Thousand.  That was a good, comfortable place to start.  Even if we have a little 21^st century voice whispering in the back of our minds, "you don't believe in miracles, do you?" we can still listen to the text and feel warm about it.  It doesn't really challenge us.

On the same Sunday, we also had the story of Jesus walking across the lake to catch up with the disciples in their boat.  Again, we may not be anxious to defend the veracity of the story with some of our secular-minded friends, but safe within our places of worship where most of us either believe the story or at least keep our disbelief to ourselves, the story is also rather nice in a safe sort of way.  It doesn't challenge us.  It doesn't suggest that as followers of Christ we ought to be able to walk across the waters as he did.

But from that feel-good start, things have begun to get more difficult as the journey through this chapter has continued.  When Jesus got back to Capernaum and started teaching in the synagogue the mood started to change.  You might remember that the crowd started off with the practical issue of how on earth Jesus had managed to get back across the lake without a boat.  They were intrigued, bewildered, genuinely seeking an explanation of the mystery.  What they got was a bit of a telling off from Jesus who questioned their motives for following him.  They didn't really want to hear his teaching: what they wanted was for him to heal their sick and feed their hungry.

From there Jesus started talking to them about the bread of heaven, with its echoes of the miraculous feeding of the Israelites in the wilderness when manna came down from heaven.  But his understanding of all that was very different from theirs.  Moses did not feed them in the wilderness; the manna came down from heaven.  And now, in the same way, he had come down from heaven as the new Bread of Heaven.  Again, their initial response to this was one of bewilderment; what on earth is he talking about?  He's a local, one of us: his parents live here in the town.  How can he claim to have come down from heaven, and why does he call himself "bread"?

But far from trying to calm them down by explaining that he was talking figuratively Jesus ploughed on; and last week he really let the cat out of the bag with the saying that starts today's passage: I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever.  This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.  We can surely understand the consternation that such a saying would have caused at that time.

So what was this all about?  I said last week that there is clear evidence that the community of faith from which St John's Gospel emerged was split, with many members walking out; and we'll see part of that evidence next week.  I also said that one of the major issues over which the split occurred was the claim that Jesus was divine.  The many references to Jesus coming down from heaven or from the Father were code for that very claim; that in some way or other Jesus was God in human flesh, or God incarnate as we might put it today.  Part of the problem there was caused by misunderstanding: many Jews thought the claim was that Jesus was "also God", in the sense that there were now two gods.  That was the issue we explored last week.

This week we have the second issue, that of the Eucharist.  There was a time when people tried to argue that this passage is not about the Eucharist, but thankfully that argument seems to have died a natural death.  There are at least two principal reasons for arguing that it is about the Eucharist.  First, as I said last week, St John does not include the institution of the Eucharist in his account of the Last Supper, as the other three gospels do.  If today's passage is not about the Eucharist, then there is no mention of it in this gospel, which seems incredible.  We know from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians that the practice was already formalised in the church in Corinth by 50AD; why would St John not know about it 40 years later?

The second reason is even more straightforward.  If this passage is not about the Eucharist, what on earth is it about?  In what other way are we to understand Jesus telling his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood?

So it's about the Eucharist.  That's the easy bit to say, but what this passage says about the Eucharist is very far from easy, and I always approach it with some trepidation because I have upset more people preaching on this passage than on any other I can think of.  This is the problem.  According to this passage, the Eucharist is essential to eternal life.  Think about that for a moment; and think about its implications.

It would be easy for us, given the classic words of administration in our Eucharistic liturgies, to look upon the Eucharist purely in terms of remembrance, rather akin to laying a wreath at the War Memorial on Anzac Day, something we do simply to bring Jesus to mind.  But that's not the teaching of the Church, and it's certainly not the teaching of St John.  We believe that the act of receiving Communion is "efficacious", to use a technical word.  Something happens to us in and through Communion, just as something happens to us in and through baptism.  In baptism we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit; in the Eucharist we receive the gift of eternal life.  That's what this passage this morning is saying.

Eternal life is that which survives death.  If we do not have eternal life we perish, we do not survive death.  That's what this gospel is talking about in the famous verse, 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."  For some reason everybody loves that verse and never seems to be troubled by it.  Nobody has ever said to me, "Does that mean that non-believers perish and do not have eternal life no matter how 'good' they are?"  And yet, the answer is "yes", isn't it?  The clear implication of the much-loved verse 3:16 is that only Christian believers have eternal life.  But that doesn't seem to worry people, and I think the reason for that is that it seems to allow some wriggle room.  It seems to allow us to say of our own loved ones, well, they are Christians in God's eyes because they are good people, even if they don't think of themselves as Christians.  I have lost count of the number of times someone has told me that there is no doubt that X has gone to heaven because he/she was such a good person.  That's not the teaching of Scripture, but it's what many Christians prefer to believe; and perhaps there is an element of vagueness in that verse that allows us to avoid taking it too seriously.

But now we come to this passage from St John and we find no such wriggle room.  Here are verses 53 and 54: Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day."  And there's the problem; that's why this passage has often got me into trouble.  Because now we are dealing with observable facts: either somebody does receive Communion, or they do not.  And if they do not, they do not have eternal life.  On death, they perish.

That is not a palatable teaching today; and as we shall see next week it was no more acceptable in St John's community of faith.  In the meantime we do well to ponder it and pray about it.  If St John has got it right, there are people we need to warn in our closest circles.

Feeding the Hungry

Texts: 2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 3: 14-21; John 6:1-21

Today we start a series of five weeks looking at just one chapter of one gospel, this chapter 6 of St John's Gospel.  It is a remarkable chapter, and many scholars have argued that it is the core of this gospel.  One writer has gone so far as to say that if you were allowed only one chapter of Scripture to have with you on a desert island or in your prison cell, choose this one!  That's not because it's a very long chapter – though that might help – but because it contains the essence of the teaching of the Christian faith.  Spend long enough reading it, pondering it, meditating on it and praying with it and you will come to know all you need to know about God.

Well, that's quite a claim, and we will be considering it in the course of the next five weeks.  But one of the difficulties with this chapter is that we cannot do it justice in anything much less than a lifetime; and certainly not in 15 minutes each week for 5 weeks.  All that we can really do is to break small bits off, chew them well, and hope to digest something of the nourishment that they provide.  And to do this with the same question in mind that should guide us all the way through this second half of our liturgical year: what does this mean for our lives of faith in our everyday world today?

As I started to think about this sermon in the context of this week two things struck me, which may or may not be related.  First, today is Social Services Sunday, on which we are encouraged to think about our social agencies and their outreach to others on behalf of our church.  There are obvious connections there with the gospel story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (if not with the walking on the water!).  The second thing that came to my mind was the launch on Tuesday by the Business Round Table of a book looking at reforming the basis of our public agencies, and particularly those operating in the social field: education, health, social welfare, etc.

The chairman of the Business Round Table was interviewed on the radio about this study on Tuesday morning, and he said some very interesting things.  The thing that most caught my ear was this: he said that if we are to improve the quality of the social services in this country we need to do two things.  The first is that we need to get real about human nature.  He said the flaw in the system we have had up to now is that we have based it on an "angelic view of human nature".  We have assumed that all persons seeking help from our social services are highly ethical, socially minded people who will only seek and accept help when we are genuinely in need, and will stop taking it as soon as we can manage without it.  But real human nature is not like that, and so we have widespread abuse of our present systems that add to their cost and give rise to widespread resentment.

The second thing, closely related to this, is that we need to look at human motivation.  The strongest motivation, he says, is self-interest: generally speaking, we will do what we judge to be in our own best interests, particularly where we believe ourselves to be genuinely in need.  However, a weaker but nevertheless competing force of motivation is altruism: sometimes, in some situations, we will set aside our own best interests for the sake of others.  Most obviously, we are more inclined to do that for our own kith and kin, or within our own circle of friends; but we are also capable of doing it for complete strangers.  Witness the extraordinary acts of bravery we hear about from time to time when a passerby has put his or her own life on the line to rescue a stranger in mortal danger.

Now, given all that, the Business Round Table study suggests, we should be seeking to design our social services to tap into human self-interest by rewarding those who make an effort to look after themselves; and to harness human altruism to provide good care for others.  And so he argues that better social services are likely to be provided by charitable agencies and the churches, because we are motivated by altruism, a desire to serve others in their best interests.  That's a nice thought, I guess, and with that nice thought in mind, I want to turn to St John's gospel.

If we were to sum up the main thrust of this gospel, I think it would be something like this St John reveals Jesus as the gift of God to the people of God to meet our deepest needs and longings.  Time after time we have references to Jesus as having come from above, having been sent by the father, and, of course, returning to the Father when the time comes.  And what has he come for?  Not to provide free medical care for the sick, although he heals people; nor to provide a free lunch for the masses, although he feeds people.  He has come from above to bring us eternal life, the life of God, through which we become children of God, like Father like son and daughter.

And I think this passage this morning shows us that we are on the wrong track if we see Jesus as some sort of miracle provider of social services.  Firstly, as we found in the reading from St Mark last week, Jesus is constantly trying to get away from the crowds of needy people; they are constantly pursuing him and, so to speak, trapping him into dealing with them.  This passage starts with Jesus crossing "to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee", but being pursued by a great crowd of people "because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on the sick".  Jesus then went up on a mountain with his disciples, but the crowd came towards him.  Jesus is not seeking them out, they are following him.

Then St John gives us an interesting piece of information.  He tells us that "The Jewish Passover Feast was near".  What's that got to do with anything?  Well, the Passover, of course, commemorates the exodus from Egypt, the journey through the wilderness, and the entry into the Promised Land.  So what follows in St John's account can be seen to be a re-enactment of all that history by Jesus.  The miraculous feeding calls to mind the supply of manna from heaven when the people were in the wilderness.  The people are shown thereby who Jesus is, God come among them, but sadly they see only the provision of bread to satisfy their physical hunger.  Everyone has enough, as they did in the wilderness, but now there's a big difference.  When the Israelites tried to store "surplus" manna, it turned rotten and couldn't be used.  There was no surplus for a future day, and there was no surplus to feed others.  But now, with the bread that Jesus supplies there is a plenitude left over.  Something more than social services meeting present need is at work here.

Then, according to St John, the crowds wanted to make him their King, and Jesus took off.  Why is that bit there, when it's not in the parallel passages in the other gospels?  Perhaps because St John has in mind the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.  Having done something rather similar to turning the stones into bread, Jesus finds himself offered political power and he declines it.  The people have misunderstood why he has come from above; they have misunderstood his essential mission to bring us eternal life.  They see only what they can get out of him.  They are blinded by self-interest: they do not recognise in him what a life of altruism looks like.

So what of our social agencies?  Do they see their role entirely in terms of meeting immediate physical needs, or is their true mission to model the altruistic life of Christ?  Do those who work there understand themselves to be servants of Christ seeking to bring eternal life to their clientele, or mere providers of food parcels for the hungry?  Do they recognise the need to draw aside and pray together, to spend time with Jesus, to re-charge their batteries with a fresh infusion of the Spirit, before they begin their work each day?  Or do they see themselves merely doing the job they are paid to do, just like any social agency that does not bear the name of Christ?

As we pray for them today let us do so in the hope that they, too, will be spending time over the next five weeks with this great chapter of St John's gospel and be nourished and strengthened by it for the work they have been called to do on our behalf.  Amen.

 

All One in Christ

Texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Our three readings today seem to me to illustrate an interesting evolution of religious thinking through the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  I've said something about this in the notes (in the pewsheet); and what I've said is very much a generalisation, or a gross over-simplification.  But in principle we can say that the Scriptures show us the people of Israel looking to and worshipping the God they called Yahweh, whom they understood to be their god – the god of their people – while understanding that other peoples had other gods.  So we see evidence of a belief that Yahweh literally fought for Israel; he accompanied them into battle, and if their forces were victorious it was because Yahweh had (literally) overpowered the other gods.  In part because of such a belief, any defeat of Israel raised awkward theological questions.  Did it mean that Yahweh had been out-muscled by the enemy's god, or that for some reason or other Yahweh had refused to fight for his people?

But over the centuries, and particularly from the time of the great prophets, the people of Israel came to see that the God they worshipped, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was the only God; and was God of all the nations and not just of Israel.  At least, that's what Israel believed on a good day.  On a more typical day, what Israel believed was a subtle variant of that: they believed that the God of Israel also had sovereignty over all the other nations of the world.

And if we think about those two views for a moment, we can see how vitally important the difference is in terms of how the people of Israel thought about themselves in relation to the other nations.  If there is one universal God of all the nations, then Israel has no special status in the eyes of God; and all the other nations are of equal status and importance.  But if the God of Israel rules over all the other nations, then surely the people of Israel are superior to the people of all the other nations?  Something of that tension between those two views is still with us today, not only in Israel, but in the Church as well, I think.

Things were so much simpler in Jeremiah's time.  Our first reading is clearly concerned with the relationship between Israel and God.  There's hardly a thought given to any other nation.  God is clearly the God of Israel; he is angry with the leaders ("shepherds") of Israel who have been remiss in their task of looking after the people, and he is going to intervene personally and dramatically.  As a result of the neglect of the shepherds, the people have been scattered to other lands (even though in one part of the text (v.3) God is quoted as having driven them out himself!); and so God is going to get rid of those hopeless shepherds, and take over the pastoral work himself, re-gathering the flock in their own pasture (Israel).  Then he will appoint new shepherds for them; and will even raise up a king from the House of David to rule over them justly and wisely.  The point of all this is that at this stage of our faith history, God seems concerned almost exclusively with Israel; and his relationship with the Gentiles enters into it only to the extend that it impinges on Israel.

Now, lets fast-forward to the time of Jesus, particularly as it is described for us in St Mark's gospel.  One of the curious features of this gospel is the central role given by it to the Lake (the Sea of Galilee).  On a number of occasions, particularly in the early chapters where St Mark is concentrating on the Jesus' teaching and healing ministry, St Mark refers to him and the disciples "crossing over to the other side".  It is important to St Mark that we know on which side of the Lake Jesus was at any particular point of the narrative.

And it seems clear that the reason for that is that the west side of the Lake was Jewish territory, and the eastern side was Gentile territory.  Hold onto that thought for a moment, and notice another interesting feature of these early chapters in St Mark's Gospel.  We find Jesus mobbed by vast crowds wherever he goes; and St Mark tells us that Jesus often tried to get away from them.  It's as if Jesus were the pop star of his day, constantly harassed by adoring fans.  And when Jesus is trying to escape from these crowds, he seems to head for Gentile country.  That may simply have been the fact of the matter, and it would make some sense; but it is possible that St Mark is using the troublesome crowds as a cover story, a defence for the fact that Jesus from time to time entered Gentile country.

 After all, there are other hints in the gospels that Jesus treated the great divide between Jew and Gentile with considerable caution.  An obvious example is found in St Matthews' version of the commissioning of the apostles.  His instructions to them are said to have included this: "Do not go among the Gentiles, or enter any town of the Samaritans.  Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel."  And, of course, we are told that Jesus tried to brush of the persistent Syro-Phoenecian woman with much the same approach.  So it seems that even Jesus felt that he had to be careful about crossing the great divide between Jews and Gentiles.

And yet St Paul is able to tells us, on more than one occasion, that in Christ God has not merely crossed the great divide, he has abolished it for ever!  And nowhere has St Paul explained this more beautifully and more movingly than in this passage we have this morning.  Just listen to these bits again: now in Christ Jesus you who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility...his purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility...consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow-citizens with God's people and members of God's household.

Marvellous stuff, isn't it?  And the tragedy is that two thousand years later we still haven't truly got our heads round it.  Think, for example, about that huge security-fence that Israel is building between it and the Palestinian communities – between it and its Gentile neighbours.  The wall says, we are two peoples; there can be no peace between us, but only hostility.  St Paul says the complete opposite; we are one people; the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, has been abolished.    Christ himself is our peace – no wall can ever make peace between us.

Now think about how that message from St Paul would be heard today by refugees, or over-stayers, seeking the right to live in this country: you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household".  Would that not be sweet music to their eyes?  Yet how many of us even recognise that matters of immigration policy raise important issues of faith?  How many of us flicker when a political party calls itself "New Zealand First", without asking ourselves, first before whom, first for what?  How many of us instinctively began to growl when our Prime Minister offered to supply Samoa with some of our precious stocks of Tamiflu?  Surely, we should make sure we have enough for ourselves before giving it to others?  Or was the offer of our Prime Minister more in keeping with the teaching of Scripture than our own gut reaction to Mr Key's offer?

It's when we realise just how many of these issues can be looked at in the light of St Paul's teaching in this one passage of Scripture that we begin to grasp something of the extraordinary breadth of his vision.  If there is one God, then it follows that there is one people, the human race.  And when we truly grasp that we have to call into question every barrier, every wall, every border that we create between ourselves and those on the other side.

When we were in Kawhia, Trish and I were invited by a group of Christian doctors to go with them on a small boat across the harbour for a picnic barbecue, and I was asked to lead them in a short bible study.  I took the text, "and Jesus crossed over to the other side."  And I invited them to look back across the harbour to whence we had started our trip and to ask themselves, this question: which side are we now on?  By crossing over we have changed the other side to this side, and this side to the other side.

Maybe that's why St Mark wants to constantly remind us that Jesus crossed over to the other side; and if we don't want to be on the other side from him, we had better go with him.

A Crashing Crescendo!

Texts: Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

So today we complete the journey we've been on for five weeks now through chapter 6 of St John's gospel.  I said at some stage of the journey that there is a sense in which we might look at this chapter as a piece of musical composition, because of the way that St John has used a small number of ideas and phrases and woven them in and out of the text as it's gone along.  The idea of bread coming down from heaven like the manna in the desert has developed into the idea of Jesus himself being that bread: the idea of life (or eternal life) is another that has been with us along the way, and it too has evolved and grown as the chapter has developed.  And joining these two themes together has been the central idea of the divinity of Christ – Jesus as the One who comes down from the Father and who will later return to the Father.

Well, if we want to continue the musical motif, we can say that today we are reaching a tremendous crescendo, with the percussion and brass sections to the fore!  The chapter is ending in uproar, with many people voting with their feet.  Jesus has pushed them too far this time.  They protest: "This is a hard saying.  Who can accept it?"  But far from backing off, Jesus continues to press the argument.  He asks them: "Does this offend you?  What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before?"

And that's an interesting response, because he seems to be responding to their first complaint, rather than their second.  We noticed two weeks ago that the audience was getting restive over his repeated assertions that he had come down from above, or had come from the Father.  At first, they were more puzzled than upset; they simply didn't get what he was saying.  But as they thought about it, and as he kept playing on this theme, they came to realise that this was a claim to be equal to God, to be divine.  That raised their temperatures more than a little bit.  And Jesus' response today seems to be challenging them on this ground.  What if you see me ascend to the Father?  Will you believe in me, then?

But as we saw last week, they had a second ground of objection, and it is this second issue that seems, in St John's narrative, to be the trigger that really sparked this outburst.  Last week, in very graphic language, Jesus was telling them that unless they ate his flesh and drank his blood they would not have life (eternal life) in them.  And we accepted (I hope!) that Jesus was talking about the Eucharist.  He was saying (courtesy of St John) that only those who receive Communion will have eternal life.

These are the clues I mentioned last week that lead scholars to say that a major split was occurring (or perhaps had already occurred) in the community of faith from which this gospel emerged.  Clearly there were some who would not accept the divinity of Christ, and would not accept the necessity of Communion; or at least, would not accept some of the teaching surrounding Holy Communion.  Perhaps they did not object to its use as a memorial to Jesus, but they did not like the idea that it was essential to eternal life.  either way, the idea of a split is underlined by some of the language that follows in this passage.

The St John has Jesus say: "The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.  Yet there are some of you who do not believe"; and then adds his own comment: "For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him."  In other words, those (in John's community of faith, who were rebelling were actually failing to believe in Jesus, and were guilty of betraying him just like Judas did.  Strong words, suggesting the bitterness of the splits within this community of faith.  And then comes the clincher:   St John writes, "From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him."

There's the crisis; people are now deserting Jesus, because they can't accept his hard teaching.  And St John, with wonderful dramatic instincts, has Jesus turn to his disciples, and ask, "You do not want to leave too, do you?"  Now, what echoes can we pick up here?  Well, the Church invites us this morning, to think of Joshua's final address to the people who have entered the Promised Land.  Whom do you wish to follow?  The dangers and hardships are behind them.  They've come out of Egypt with all the risks involved in making their escape; they have survived years of deprivation wandering the desert; and they have invaded Canaan and subdued its inhabitants.  The hard work has been done.  But now they face a new danger – complacency.  The old human tendency to relax when the battle has been won, and take peace for granted.  In faith terms, to plead for God's help when things have turned to custard; but to forget God when all is again well.

So Joshua addresses them bluntly.  They must decide whom they will follow.  They can't have a bob each way.  They must give their total allegiance to God, and reject all other pagan gods, whether they are the ancestral deities from Mesopotamia, or the gods of Egypt, or the gods of the Canaanites.

Well, maybe there is something of this in the back of St John's mind as he writes today's passage; but far more likely, in my view, he is thinking of the episode when Jesus and his disciples were discussing public perceptions of Jesus; and then Jesus asked them, "Who do you say I am?"  Again, it is Peter who answers for them all; but the terms of his answer are slightly different this time.  They have been tailored to fit the context of this chapter.  "Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."

We are back to the theme of eternal life.  The disciples cannot leave Jesus because he is the sole source of eternal life.  How can that be?  Because he is the Holy One of God – code for God himself.  St John spells all this out even more clearly in chapter 5 of his First Letter: "God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.  Those who have the Son, have life; those who do not have the Son, do not have life."

This is, indeed, a hard saying; and as somebody commented to me after the service last week, universalism is so much easier.  But what if it's wrong?  What if St John has got it right and we don't tell people what it says?

As always, St Paul has something relevant to say:  "Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains.  Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should."

And as the whole Church should, too.