Sermon.
30 August 2015. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford.
Trinity
13 Year B
Psalm
15
James
1.17-27
Mark
7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Whether
you've had your holiday or not (if you're lucky enough to get one),
we as a Church are now back from our holiday in John's Gospel, back
to the Gospel of the year, Mark. And we are straight into one of the
classic conflicts of Matthew, Mark and Luke (the synoptics), between
the Pharisees (boo!) and Jesus (hurray!). And also pretty typically
it concerns food, different practices that the Pharisees and Jesus'
disciples have around food, here, on ritual hand-washing. It is this
passage – although the way the selectors cut-and-pasted the text we
don't get the actual quotation – which contains Mark's comment:
'Thus he declared all food clean' [Mark 7.19]. So, some would say, if
you are going out after this (and I know at least one of you is) to
enjoy prawn cocktail, and a cheeseburger with a side-order of chips
fried in lard, this is the passage you have to thank. For the first
five books of the Bible forbid - and observant Jews still avoid - all
pork foods, shellfish, and mixing meat and milk.
Well,
you know me by now (it's nearly a year since my licensing). You know
of my love of Judaism and that part of my vocation which has to do
with Jewish-Christian reconciliation. Now, I do promise I won't
always say the same things whenever we hear of a conflict between
Jesus and the Pharisees. But today I will look at the 'Jesus v the
Pharisees' thing (with apologies to those of you – the vast
majority I am sure - who of course will remember some of this from my
sermon on the equivalent passage in Matthew).
First,
the passage itself does not mean that Jesus and his disciples
abandoned Jewish food commandments. Think about it. If it did, the
Pharisees would tackle Jesus on precisely that, and not on
hand-washing. On the contrary, it's now thought that Jesus was an
observant Jews by the messy and controverted standards of his day.
Second,
it is not true that the Pharisees formed one block, or were 'the
establishment'. The establishment would be the priests/Sadducees. The
Pharisees were more like the radical new missionaries (missionaries
to fellow Jews). So they weren't stuffy, or conservative. They were
'legalistic' in the sense that they wanted people to observe the
commandments of Gd in detail in everyday life. But that was not
because they thought Gd was distant, and concerned with laws alone,
or angry and so needing to be appeased.
We see
this pretty clearly in the First Reading, which is from Deuteronomy,
which contains many of those commands. We hear:
keep the commandments of the LORD your Gd... You must
observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and
discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes,
will say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!'
So the
commandments are good things,
given out of Gd's love, to help people
live the good life. And later in Deuteronomy Gd says:
this commandment that I am commanding you today is not
too hard for you, nor is it too far away... No,
the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart
for you to observe. [Deut 30.11-14.]
The
Pharisees believed this, and thought it was wrong that only an elite
in the Temple really concentrated on most of the commandments. They
were about bringing Judaism to the common people.
Third,
it is true (there's no getting round it) that Jesus' main
opponents in most of Matthew, Mark and Luke are the Pharisees. But
many scholars now make the point that your fiercest opponents are
often those you are closest to. Just perhaps one analogy might be the
debate within the Labour Party at the moment. All participants take
for granted that the Tories are wrong, to be countered surely, but
'over there'. The real heated cut-and-thrust is within the party. (In saying
this, of course I am not going to say which if any of the leadership
candidates resembles any of the biblical characters!) What I am
saying is that all the apparently and really hard words between Jesus
and the Pharisees are best seen as an in-house debate.
Fourth,
we actually see this at some points, when we see it's far too simple
to see the Pharisees as 'the enemy'. They have very little role in
the build-up to the crucifixion. And they are the ones who warn Jesus
about Herod for example [Luke 13.31]. Jesus says of the scribes and
the Pharisees that 'they sit on Moses' seat' [Matthew 23.2]. So they
do have real authority. And of a scribe and only of a scribe does
Jesus say, when they are discussing love of Gd and neighbour, 'you
are not far from the kingdom of Gd' [Mark 12.28-34.]
I say
all of this because in the Jewish way of telling the story of faith,
the Pharisees are heroes. They are the forerunners of the rabbis.
This is because both were all about interpreting all the commandments
given at Sinai, to make them possible, workable and humane, for the
people in real life. Indeed, Rabbi Lionel Blue once made this point
by publishing a book on Judaism, calling it
To Heaven with Scribes
and Pharisees.
There's
something else I feel compelled to say.
I think what I have shared is
right. But, still, a haunting question is: what if it isn't? What if
the traditional Christian view of the Pharisees, utterly negative,
were right? What if the Pharisees were strange, different, alien,
incontrovertibly other... foreign?
I
ask... I ask because for me there is one image from this last week
which I cannot lose. I cannot lose the image, even though I haven't
seen it. But it is simply the words:
police have recovered the heavily decomposed remains of
71 people from the back of a sealed refrigerated lorry abandoned
between Hungary and Austria.
You
heard it too. At first they spoke of between 30 and 50 people. So the
fact that there were 71 makes it so much worse – yet more people,
who must have been more crammed together than people had dare to
imagine, and/or they must have been small, and so probably young.
It is
now thought they were Syrian. Now, if they were Syrian, we can be
sure – it's a moral certainty - they were seeking asylum in Europe,
were refugees. So they might well have views like ours. They
might even have been Christians. The Christian community in Syria is
ancient, indigenous, and is or was substantial. But, even if they
weren't any of these things... they were still human beings.
It's a
truism. It feels naff to say it, just throwing a slogan around. But I
wonder if it is. I wonder if we do not need to teach ourselves all
over again that all human beings are just that, human beings. Because
I was imagining that that horrible death-lorry, along with the two
boats from Libya upturned in the Mediterranean killing around 200...
I thought these images would be a true, sharp, shattering and
necessary 'wake-up call' for Europeans, for Britons in particular.
That we must not treat 'migrants' as some lesser species, some malign
force out to get us and deprive us of our livelihoods. They are,
firstly, and lastly, human just like us.
The
humanity of human beings is a truth. And the importance of the truth
is stressed in our readings today. Jesus tells us that slander out of
the heart defiles a person. The Letter of James says that we are born
from the truth and are to bridle our tongues. And let us not
overlook today's psalm:
who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk
blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their
heart, who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their
friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbours.
Let us
– us as people, as a nation and as a continent – attend to this
truth. Amen.
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