1
Kings 19:15-16, 19-21
Sermon.
St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 26 June 2016
Trinity
5 (Year C)
Luke
9.51-61
The
last time I preached I suggested we as a nation were celebrating the
Queen's Birthday and a range of other things, which suggested harmony
in all our diversity. What a difference a fortnight makes! Today it
looks much more like we are a country divided. Indeed the divisions
are themselves manifold:- between young and old;
- between London and the provinces;
- between the four nations which make up our United Kingdom;
- and between those who have confidence in the political processes we've been used to, and those who have lost all confidence, perhaps.
Our
lawmakers, negotiators and commentators will need cool heads,
imaginative minds and generous hearts, if we are to make new
national arrangements work. And, let's be honest, we as a Church (at
whatever level) need to redouble our efforts to pray for our nation
and its leaders.
One
thing we won't need in the coming days is more sound-bites. You know
- reducing
- complicated decisions,
- judgement calls,
- balances of arguments based on probabilities
- and genuine differences of conscience
to
simple slogans.
Sound-bites,
and simple slogans. The Church is not free of them of course. Indeed,
some people use the Bible precisely to find sound-bites and simple
slogans. They are typically meant to encourage us. If you go to a
retreat house, there'll probably be a picture of a beautiful sunset
on the wall and some Bible quotation about Gd being in charge and all
being well. And there are some Christian traditions which have
'promise boxes'. Heard of them? A box with bits of paper in it, on
which are written different positive Bible verses. Each member of the
family can then pull out a Bible promise, before Sunday lunch.
I
suspect you don't have a promise box. But, still, it's quite hard to
fully shake off a sense that the Bible is a 'book of quotations'.
That if we only had more time, learning or holiness, we could sit
down and read the Bible, sentence by sentence, and find good things
to build up our faith in every single sentence. But is that
right?
You
have realised I am hinting it is not right. It's not the case that
the Bible just consists of encouraging sentences, to be consumed like
a spiritual tube of Pringles, one after the other, on and on. No. The
Bible is often hard to understand. It comes from an alien time and an
alien place. And even people who have spent their lives studying the
languages cannot always (cannot often) tell you what it actually
means. There's no point hiding from this.
And...
we have an example of one of those phrases which are hard to
understand, and very hard to find encouraging, in today's gospel.
- Jesus says to a fellow Jew: 'follow me'.
- They reply: 'first let me go and bury my father'.
- Jesus, then: 'Let the dead bury their own dead'.
Or:
'leave [or even 'abandon'] the dead to bury their dead'.
What
did Jesus mean?
Well,
first let's be clear just how shocking this response from Jesus is.
Throughout the world, dealing with the mortal remains of people who
have died is important. No society simply leaves corpses to decay
where they are (or rather, when they do, it is a measure of the
horrific chaos they've descended to). All cultures have strong
expectations and rituals about the right way of disposing of dead
bodies - whether that means burial, cremation, or carrying off to a
special place high in the mountains, and so on – and it's
taboo/forbidden to go against them.
But
no culture makes more of this than Judaism. There is a presumption,
from Abraham and Sarah on, in favour of burial. And dealing properly
with the dead is one of the most important of Gd's commandments.
Failure to perform it brings shame. The rabbis stressed this. They
pointed out how often Gd commands us to deal kindly and justly with
the poor. And the poorest of the poor are the dead: not only do they
not have money; they don't even have breath. What is more (continued
the rabbis) the best kind of service is offered without any
expectation of a return or thanks. And when we show proper respect to
a dead person, we can be sure of this: they are not going to thank us
or do us a favour back. So it's the ultimate good deed.
This
means, both because every society has a horror of leaving dead bodies
un-cared-for, and because in Jewish society, care for the dead is a
solemn duty, and care for your own parents when they die is a family
task that takes priority over anything else, today, Jesus shocks.
'Leave
[or abandon] the dead to bury their dead.'
What
did he mean?
We
don't know. There are no details in the story to help us see the
context and work out what was really going on. It is an encounter as
stark and bare as it is shocking.
We
don't know, but some suggestions are often made. One is that the
first reference is - or both references are - not actually to the
literally dead, but to the 'spiritually dead', meaning people who are
not at all drawn to Jesus. There are those who feel compelled to
follow Jesus, and there are those who are unmoved. And you have to
decide which group you are in.
This
is possible of course. But one problem with it is that it does seem
to mean that Jesus is spectacularly insensitive. If anyone were to
say to us: 'I've got to bury a relative', we would not say 'Ah, that
gives me a good illustration on how to live properly, how to be
Christian'. No. We'd find some words of consolation and offer help.
So
indeed another interpretation is that nobody is really literally dead
in this scenario. The person's father isn't dead. He may be seriously
ill. But this means that what the person is asking for is not
permission to perform a quick ritual but 'indefinite leave' from
following Jesus, while they tend for his father. He is then asking to
join-yet-not-join the disciples in their work. And it is that
double-mindedness Jesus is objecting to. So he finds a colourful way
to ask the person if they are serious. Or, even, on this reading, the
father isn't ill, and the person called to follow is inventing an
excuse which they think will work, will be unanswerable. They are
fibbing, and Jesus is calling them on it.
Again,
either of these is possible. But it is pure surmise. There's nothing
in the text to require such a reading. And we might still ask: Why
then if it is so, did Jesus not simply say: 'But your father isn't
dead'? Why instead this phrase that rings out through the centuries?
A phrase which, taking the words at their most literal and
straightforward, every Christian community everywhere has always
ignored:
'Leave
[or abandon] the dead to bury their dead.'
Well,
I offer one more interpretation. It says this. Jesus (or Luke, who wrote it down) knows
how difficult the saying is. Indeed, it seems horrible, and calls us
to the impossible. That is neither accidental, nor regrettable. It's
actually the point. Humanly speaking, the Christian life is
impossible. It calls for an abandonment of all comfort, security,
custom and decorum. When the call from Christ comes, it is utterly
urgent, and relativises everything, absolutely everything else. As
Jesus in another place says: 'Greet no one on the way'. What we
actually do to care for dead bodies is not the issue here. Not
remotely. It is rather that we feel ourselves shocked to the core by
Jesus's radical message. Not 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', but
'fierce
Jesus, rude and upsetting'.
In
other words, it is there to get us to face with all starkness the
question:
Are
we willing to find Jesus upsetting?
Given
that Jesus is so prepared to shock,
that
Jesus is not to be domesticated,
that
he does not offer us simple rules to live decently
but
calls us on an all-demanding adventure into the unknown,
do
we (do we, the readers and hearers or this gospel) do we today...
leave
Jesus, or do we remain with Jesus?
In
another context, it's a question we are all very tired of, for sure.
But,
given what Jesus says, it is today's question.
Amen.
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