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TRYING OUT CHRISTIANITY - PROPERLY Sunday - 23rd October 2005 (Last Sunday after Trinity) Trinity 22 | Year A | Proper 25 Track 1 | Ordinary Time Week 30 Deuteronomy 34.1-12 | 1 Thessalonians 1.2.1-8 | Matthew 22.34-46 : To see the current week's readings, click here The Promised Land and Moses death; the gospel is open; the two most important commands - love This week's terrible joke... A priest wanted to raise money for his church and, on being told that there was a fortune in horse racing, decided to purchase a horse and enter it in the races. However, at the local auction, the going price for horses was so high that he ended up buying a donkey instead.
The priest was so pleased with the donkey that he entered it in the next day's race, and this time it won. The paper then read: PRIEST'S ASS OUT IN FRONT. The Bishop was so upset with this kind of publicity that he ordered the priest not to enter the donkey in another race. The paper's headline the next day read: BISHOP SCRATCHES PRIEST'S ASS. This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the priest to get rid of the donkey. The priest decided to give the donkey to a nun in a nearby convent. The headline the next day read: NUN HAS BEST ASS IN TOWN.
She sold the donkey to a farmer for $10. Next day the headline read: NUN SELLS ASS FOR $10. This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the nun to buy back the donkey & lead it to the plains where it could run wild and free. Next day, the headline in the paper read: NUN ANNOUNCES HER ASS IS WILD AND FREE. The Bishop was buried the next day. In a fit of literary mania I’m going to begin and end this morning with two quotations. The first one justifies that appalling joke, the second sums up the gospel reading, and both are from the writer GK Chesterton. He said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke out of it...” He also said: “It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting: it has been found difficult and left untried.” GK Chesterton (1874-1936), English Roman Catholic essayist & novelist. Love is the heart of our faith, and to love people in the abstract is one thing, but to love the people we actually rub shoulders with is something different... TESTING TESTING...
And the pattern repeats itself: Jesus is asked a no-win question, to which he gives an insightful and brilliant answer, and then turns the challenge round to the questioner... IT’S THE LAW!
So today when asked to sum up the whole Law, the whole Old Testament, the whole of what God wanted from human beings, Jesus says: love God and love your neighbour. That’s it. SIMPLE, BUT DIFFICULT...! Jesus shows how closely love is connected. Three objects of love are called for: God, neighbour and self. They are interlinked, and they are dependent. We show love for God by loving our neighbours: we can only love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves. Simple, profound, brilliant, and not easy to put into practice! GK Chesterton was right!... Having managed to give the perfect answer to the test question, Jesus then asks the Pharisees a question - not to test them, or to trip them up, but to show something about himself. THE MESSIAH - IN DAVID’S IMAGE?
But, Jesus says, if you are expecting the Messiah to be a Son of David, why is it that in a psalm that David writes he refers to the Messiah as “my Lord” - implying that the Messiah is greater than David, and thus can’t be just his son, but must be something more too... JESUS’ CLAIMS
But here, to the Pharisees Jesus is implying that the Messiah is greater than King David. Son of David is not an accurate enough title for the Messiah - and Messiahship must be thought of in terms wider than just military leadership. Why is it significant that we have this reading today? Partly because today marks the end of Ordinary Time... Next Sunday is All Saints Sunday and this marks the start of a short period called the Kingdom Season, which takes us into Advent. We’ll be moving from the green of Ordinary Time to the red of the Kingdom Season. THE KINGDOM AND A KING So over the next few weeks we’ll be encouraged to think about what it means to have Jesus as our King... What shape will Jesus’ reign take? What kind of King is he, what kind of Messiah, what kind of Lord?... And how are we to be his subjects, his army, his servants, his brothers and sisters?
So Jesus manages to turn an attack designed to trip him up, into a brilliant and incisive comment getting right to the heart of what God is about and how God calls us to live in the world; and then tops it with the very clear implication that he, the Messiah, is more than just a son of David, or a son of man, but one greater than Solomon, greater than Jonah, and greater than the Temple... What about the “so what” question? The issue seems to be about how we respond to the love which the Messiah has made known to us, the love God has for us... If we engage with loving God, with trying to turn towards that smile that God lavishes on us, there are implications for the way we regard others and even ourselves. OUR NEIGHBOURS BECOME LOVEABLE...!
If we remove that love of God then we can despair at the human beings around us... we can see them as stupid, violent, selfish and graceless; we can become pessimistic that not only can nothing be done, but that it’s not worth doing anything to help, or provide for people. Once we lose sight of human beings as made in God’s image, then others can become merely a collection of chemicals, important only for what we can gain for them, expendable machines... or human beings become reduced to a selection of arbitrary and legalistic “rights”, and we’re back at the 614 laws with which the Pharisees had surrounded God. In one sense civilised society becomes possible as we learn to love God and as we learn to love others who are made in the image of God. ...AND WE BECOME LOVEABLE! And it is a fact that we will love others as much as we love ourselves. It’s a bit like the fact associated with forgiveness. You may remember a few weeks ago we came across the teaching that Jesus gave about how God’s forgiveness of us is linked with our forgiveness of others.
And here’s another statement of fact too: the measure with which we love ourselves is the measure with which we are capable of loving others. If we really don’t love ourselves very much, if we don’t really think much of ourselves, if we don’t think we deserve to be loved, or that we should really be taken seriously, or listened to, or known - then we’re actually going to find it very difficult to think much of others, or to accept that others deserved to be loved, or taken seriously, or listened to, or known. So this new way of loving, of seeing others as infinitely precious and loved in God’s sight, also means realising that we are infinitely precious and loved in God’s sight! And when we start thinking about the other people we brush along with we begin to realise that although they may have different coloured skin, or use a different language, or practice a different religion, or have a sexuality or a gender which is different to us, they are still made in the image of God and loved by God... Just as that same God loves us regardless of our colour, or language or whatever.... So we will engage in loving them because any friend of God’s is a friend of mine! So there’s a challenge in the logicality of what Jesus says. There’s also a challenge to us... RELIGIOUS PEOPLE IN JESUS DAY... RELIGIOUS PEOPLE IN OUR DAY...
If we can pick holes in the way someone speaks or expresses themselves, if we can think of ourselves as better educated or more respectable, then we can ignore the content of what they’re saying, we can ignore the challenge... So there are at least four challenges to us:
That’s probably enough to be going on with for today...! I warned you that I was going to finish with two quotations, the first is from Rev Angela Tilby English theologian and Vice Principle of Wescott House theological college in Cambridge: “Love remains the vocation of all who are baptised and love is a sign of God to the whole community. Yet love hurts. Here it is that some of us make our most costly mistakes. Here it is often that our personal story looks most wobbly and incomplete. Here it is also that we come to know God not only as our Creator, but as our redeemer, our lover, the hound of heaven who will not let us go.” Angela Tilby English theologian. The second quotation comes from Martin, aged 5. Dear God, I bet it's very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it Martin aged 5
Fr Andrew J Perry
Picture Credits on this page |
He
figured that since he had it, he might just as well go ahead and enter it in
the races. To his surprise, the donkey came in third!
The
Bishop fainted. He informed the nun she couldn't keep the donkey.
In
the gospel reading we again see the religious people are not interested in
pursuing truth, but in testing Jesus... they don’t really want to know the
answer to the question they set him - they are really trying to trip him up,
to make him look stupid and to discredit him. We saw this last week in the
question about whether or not they should pay taxes to the Emperor; the
incident immediately between last Sunday’s gospel and today’s gospel is when
Sadducees come and test Jesus with a religious question they don’t even
believe in! They try and trap Jesus with another good religious question of
the day.
There
were 614 commands in the law... that’s quite a few. They covered almost
every aspect of a person’s life, and keeping the law was seen as the way of
doing what God required, of doing God’s will. The Law was in danger of
becoming a legalistic and oppressive burden, rather than a life-giving
ordinance to help people stay in relationship with God. What had happened
was that when the ten commandments were given, and that seemed straight
forward enough, but as they were teased out, so the rabbis and teachers
expanded on what they meant and added to the number and scope of the
commands... until the total reached 614. And a person’s righteousness -
their standing with God - was assessed and measured in their keeping of the
law. So when a young man came to Jesus (Mt 19.16f) and asked what he had to
do to inherit eternal life (16), and Jesus said “Keep the commandments” the
young man said “Well I’ve done that, what else do I lack?” and Jesus told
him to go beyond legalism and learnt to rely on God in a personal way, to
remove the prop of wealth, to find a relationship with God not based on law
but on faith (21).
The
Messiah that everyone - Pharisees included - are waiting for, would be one
who was from the house of David, or from the line of David, or in the mould
of David. King David had been the most successful monarch Israel had
experienced - successful in the sense that he did what a king was supposed
to do, he was a man after God’s own heart; he was a warrior, brave and
courageous who took Israel from being an insignificant backwater to being a
force to be reckoned with. He was a former shepherd, a musician and a poet,
he stayed faithful to God and led the nation to greatness in the name of
Yahweh. He still managed to break five of the ten commandments in one brief
episode involving the wife of one of his generals, but he was the best king
Israel ever had, and when they looked forward to a Messiah - an anointed
one, a deliverer - to come, the Jews expected him to be a “son of David” -
although to be fair they thought more about David’s military achievements,
rather than his shepherding skills...
If
you read the synoptic gospels (i.e. the first three) carefully it’s very
rare for Jesus to make direct claims about himself.. he is content to let
others hail him, or even worship him, but it’s rare for Jesus to make direct
statements. He does however warn the religious establishment that in himself
there is something greater than Jonah (Mt 12.41), and greater than Solomon
(Mt 12.42), and even greater than the temple (Mt 12.6)
Remember
that hymn we sang last week? “The king of love my shepherd is...”
It’s
not possible to say that we love God without loving our neighbours; and,
more than that, it becomes possible to love our neighbours as we learn to
love God. Our neighbours become loveable as we love God! Why? Because of the
dawning realisation that we are made in the image of God.
We
thought about what that might mean and how we might understand it and I
suggested that it was more a case of a statement of fact: if I can’t let go
of a wrong done to me, then I can’t receive God’s forgiveness because my
hands are clenched and grasping, not open and ready to receive... If you
don’t remember that I’m sure you remember the best way to catch a monkey...
Remember
the sobering warning that in the gospels whenever we meet the religious
establishment of Jesus’ day we must have half an ear open to hear something
said to ourselves, since we claim to be the religious establishment of our
day... The Pharisees and Sadducees were asking Jesus questions, not in order
to seek truth, not in order to really find out, but in order to trip Jesus
up, to deflect the claims Jesus was making and the challenges his very
presence was throwing out.