How to Fail at Jewish-Christian Relations

HOW TO FAIL AT JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

TALK TO THE WOODROFFE SOCIETY 

OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD,

6 NOVEMBER 2017

For reasons which will become only too obvious, I’d like to speak on how to Fail at Jewish-Christian Relations (JCR), this from the Christian side of things. 

I begin with an anecdote that doesn’t involve me, but which is true. Rabbi Julia Neuberger tells of giving a talk at a Christian seminary. At the end, a seminarian said: “I myself have no problem with woman rabbis.” Rabbi Neuberger smiled, and thought: “That’s nice, but what’s it to you?” “But,” the young man continued: “What about the sacrifices? Are you physically strong enough to perform the sacrifices.” The good rabbi confided: “I came very close to saying: ‘It’s alright unless they struggle’”. But instead she explained to the Christian at necessary length how rabbinic Judaism is different from the religion of the Old Testament, that home and synagogue (or shul) had well and truly replaced the Temple, and prayer and learning had replaced sacrifice. 

That seminarian has done us all a favour. For we will all fail at JCR if we allow ourselves to think that Judaism is the religion of the Old Testament. One powerful introduction which both your chaplain and I once heard, from an Orthodox rabbi, [Rabbi Norman Solomon) began with the Mishnah, the first rabbinic document, compiled around 200 CE, consisting largely of legal details absent from the Scriptures themselves. And increasingly one is encouraged to think of Judaism and Christianity as sibling religions. After all, after the Mishnah (200 CE) there were a good three centuries before the Talmud (in two versions, Babylonian and Palestinian) was itself completed, and it is on the Talmud that much later Judaism rests. In other words, the rabbis (or, within the family, Chazal, chachamim zikhronam livrekhah - our Sages, may their memory be blessed) were giving definitive shape to Judaism as we know it - in precisely those days when the Church Fathers were giving shape to Christianity, through councils and creeds. In Roman Catholic circles, it is now commonplace to speak of the Jewish People as “our elder brother”. Precisely how much older is not the point. That is more a nod to the understanding that Judaism has a more direct link at least to aspects of the Hebrew tradition which is our common ancestor. [It is not a term without its own difficulties. Jews, knowing the biblical stories, know that the elder brother often loses out to the younger.]

In saying that Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament, I have brought us into another way to fail at this relationship. I was once speaking to a Jewish audience about modern Catholic approaches to Judaism. (Does Pope Francis think that Jews are “Anonymous Christians”? was the title, with more than a nod to Karl Rahner.) As I was outlining some of the recent texts, I mentioned, with heavy, heavy scare-marks “the Old Testament”, as that is the language both used and defended in the Catholic documents. Still, in questions, someone - an extremely gentle, gentleman who I consider a friend - gently insisted that that language was offensive. This because for Jews it is the only Testament, and is in no sense old, in the sense of needing modernising, replacing, or fading away. 

There are ironies here. What I have just been saying about Judaism and Christianity as sibling religions can be reframed thus: neither faith treats the Hebrew Scriptures as complete in themselves. For Christians, they are completed by the New Testament. For Jews, they are complemented by the later Mishnah and Talmud and stories in the form of midrash. This latter set is called “the Oral Law” or “the Oral Torah” (Torah she-be-al-peh) alongside the Written Torah (Torah bikhtav). Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner speaks of rabbinic religion as being the Judaism of the Dual Torah, on this basis. Another point: one thing orthodox Christians certainly do not mean by calling the First Testament “Old” is that it is worn out or passing away. In orthodoxy it is axiomatic that it remains Revelation. And that one Gd is revealed from Genesis to Revelation. That the “God of the Old Testament” is war-like and judgemental is one of the earliest Christian heresies (Marcionism) even though it is a popular trope in wider culture. I sometimes make the point this way: it would be better if we spoke of “the Original Testament”, that would convey more about the interaction between the two Testaments.

But we must turn from these lighter matters to more weighty ones. I have to say you will fail at JCR if you think you can say anything wholly right about Jewish belief. There is a book, author Menachem Kellner, entitled Must a Jew Believe Anything? The majority report is No. A Jew is one who identifies as belonging to the Jewish People and typically does, or tries to do, Jewish things, around circumcision, diet, the day of rest, and of course ethics and compassion. If you go to shul (synagogue) and try to speak of Gd, it is not at all unlikely that you will meet someone who says, “But I don’t believe in Gd”. Again, if you were to try to convert, it is likely you will be asked all kinds of questions about your kitchen, and how you spend your Saturdays. But it is unlikely you will be asked about your belief in Gd. 

There are different layers here. For some, in synagogue as in college, only the Dawkins’ definition of Gd counts. That is: Gd as an item within the universe, who, if he existed, could be examined and analysed like any other item in the universe, so that the statement “that there exists at least one supernatural being” is the one to be tested. Well, that is as far from the orthodox Christian understanding of what “belief in God” is as it is the traditional Jewish one. For others, it is quite specifically the Holocaust, or the Shoah which destroyed faith in Gd, Gd as benign. Before the Shoah, the mainstream idea was that Gd would indeed allow the Jewish people to suffer and even endure persecution for the sake of Gd, but would never abandon them or let them be destroyed. That kind of “covenant” seemed to burn in the ovens of Auschwitz, to many. But, over and above these points, it is the case that faith or belief play a different role in Judaism than in most forms of Christianity. 

In Christianity, the creed is recited solemnly in the middle of the eucharist and at other times. In Orthodoxy, according to the letter of the text, catechumens are sent out before it is recited, such is its mystery and power. We may insist that to say “We believe in Gd the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit,” the “believing” in question is more about trust, or even giving your heart to Gd-so-named, than it is about accepting a quasi-scientific proposition, but this only emphasises the importance of the creed. In Judaism, there is no creed as such. There are the 13 Principles of the Rambam (Maidonides) which have much of the feel of a creed. They refer to Gd as creator, as one, as eternal, as incorporeal, and to Moses as unequalled Prophet and Torah as revelation. But these are recited right at the end of the service, really as a jolly little tune. Certainly, one can be a very devout and observant Jew and take issue with many or most of the Principles. 

That said, it has happened time and again to me that I have heard a Jew say “we Jews don’t really do theology; that feels like abstraction and surmise to us” after they have actually just offered some truly beautiful theology, or interpretation of a Bible story. The joke is that to be Jewish you don't have to believe in Gd, you just have to obey Gd. But there is no doubt that that obedience involves worship, praising Gd, thanking Gd, asking for good things from Gd. And (a different point) the distinction between “Orthodox” and “Progressive” Judaism is theoretically at least a matter of doctrine, whether all of the Written Torah is direct revelation from heaven. So I would say that Judaism has to do with Gd as much as Christianity does, and so by extension with belief. But the framework for any reflecting on Gd is that one is not in a school of faith, but a school of interpretation, where all questions can constantly be asked.

If it is hard to know whether or how to speak of Gd in JCR, it is at least as hard to speak of Israel. A former director of the Council of Christians and Jews tells of giving a talk about the eucharist, and its resonances with Jewish practice. The first question was indeed on the bread and the wine. But the second was on the State of Israel and its actions. And this happened again and again. She ended up “biting the bullet” and setting up the Forum for the Discussion on Israel-Palestine, with Jews, Christians and Muslims integral to the task. The scope for misunderstanding is great. In the first place, it is always worth checking whether a Jewish person is speaking of the person, Jacob-Israel, the People Israel (Am Yisrael) or the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) or the State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael). 

When it comes to the State and its policies, there is no one position that is the Jewish one. Debate on all aspects is fierce and complex. It happens that a clear majority of Jews in this country do support “the two state solution” and are typically against the settlements. But the bigger picture and the smaller details are all disputed. 

By no means do all Jews identify as Zionist. Some indeed do say that they are anti-Zionist on religious grounds; they believe Jews cannot have full power in the land before Messiah comes. For others, the grounds would be that they are against all nationalisms. Others would be non-Zionist, simply believing that the heart of their Judaism lies elsewhere. 

However, the vast majority would want to insist that Zionism is not a dirty word; Zionism is an honourable position, even for Jews who do not share it. Zionism is simply the view that the Jews are a people like all all peoples, and that as such the Jewish people are as entitled to self-determination as any other people, and that, at least since 1948 this has meant self-determination in the form of the nation state of Israel. This is felt, as much as it is thought about. Amos Oz writes movingly about his father talking to him on the day independence was declared. His father says he should rejoice. They now lived in a country where no one (no fellow-citizen) would humiliate or attack them simply for being a Jew. They were, in the ordinary sense of the word, safe.  

Notice that in giving this account of Zionism I had no recourse to talk of Gd. Indeed, before the Second World War Zionism was secular in the main, and often expressly socialist. Think of the kibbutzim. But after the war, for obvious reasons, religious Jews were also as drawn to Zionism. So indeed often reference is made to the centrality of the Land in the Bible, and of the longing for Zion expressed time and again in the Jewish liturgy. Beyond that, some even think about the refounding of the nation in the Land as miracle, as the dawn of redemption, as messianic at least in embryo. But this is by no means the only way to be a religious Zionist.

I do believe it is true that in discussions with Jews one can indeed criticise any aspect of Israeli politics. Just be aware that Zionism to your partner does not mean “what Netanyahu and those to the right of him do” but an honourable and broad network of ideas. And also be aware that Christianity has a long and ignoble history of valorising Jewish powerlessness. Think of the wandering Jew of St Augustine’s thinking, destined to wander the earth without power or dignity, for killing Christ and rejecting Gd. This has played no small part in the ongoing relationship. So Jews will be suspicious if they pick up a sense that Jews or Israelis are being held to a standard no other people must keep, as if Jews are uniquely to be distrusted with power, always on probation as it were. But over and above all of that, just don’t approach any Jew (who is not already a friend), and expect them either to defend Israeli policies in the light of your objections, or for that matter to disassociate themselves from them, for your convenience. 

Speaking about Jesus Christ is a good way to fail at JCR. I am not thinking so much of the question: “why did you Jews not accept Jesus as the Messiah?” I assume we can all see how, within the Jewish framing of things, Jesus does not figure. Jews did not “reject” Jesus any more than Christians have “rejected” Muhammad, or Baha’ullah, or Joseph Smith. I am thinking of what really prompted my title today. In the (otherwise) excellent book edited by Rabbi Tony Bayfield, Deep Calls to Deep, I have a chapter seeking to set out the orthodox creedal position on Jesus Christ - the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity - in ways that made sense to Jews. I drew heavily on John Zizioulas’ work, Being as Communion. I said that rather than think of the classical creeds as the Hellenisation of Christianity, they can be thought of as the biblicisation of Hellenism, i.e. bringing Hebraic ideas right into the heart of Hellenistic religion. The core conviction being: whereas in Hellenism, Gd, or the Most Real, is always distant from us, and our point of contact can only be indirect, via emanation after emanation, the Biblical understanding, shared by Jews and Christians, is that when one meets with Gd, it really is Gd one meets, Gd as Gd is Gd. Gd is not distant, but with us as-it-were as Agent. Christians and Jews, then, disagree about where one meets with Gd most centrally (at Sinai or at Calvary), but still share more in common than is usually thought. I drew secondarily on the work of Daniel Boyarin, who insisted that in some strands of Second Temple Judaism, a heavenly messiah was already thinkable, as found in some interpretations of the Son of Man in Daniel. I did not win any of my Jewish readers round, at all. Maybe it was because of the difficulty of comparing Christian belief with Jewish “belief” at all. Maybe it was the Boyarin reference, where I was giving two much credibility to fringe or heretical Jewish texts. I don’t know. 

Much more could be said. For rabbinic Jews, the Pharisees are the forerunners of the rabbis, and are heroes, and liberal reformers. To criticise any view as “Pharisaical” will win you no friends. Jews also tend to reject any teaching of “original sin” and of “salvation”, if “salvation” is taken to mean rescue from damnation. But, over and above all such details, Jews are very much aware of the power-imbalance in the relationship. There are well over a billion Christians in the world, under 20 million Jews. About half this nation identifies as Christian, about 0.5% as Jewish. And Christians have, let me put this delicately, played to their numerical strength, in persecuting Jews, and not least in setting up false “disputations” where the Jew was always bound to lose to the Christian. 

But I leave you not on that note, but on this one. My sense is that JCR are bound to fail, if by success we imagine a state of being where each fully understands the other. I can describe my involvement only as an oscillation, where I move from thinking “we are at heart the same”, to “no, we are very different”, and back again. Cardinal Kasper has called Judaism “as a sacrament of every otherness”. [Address on the 37th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate, 2002] As such, it is a mystery we can never wholly understand. I say, with my best Hebrew, Amen. 

Sermon. The Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

Sermon. 23 October 2016. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford.

Last Sunday After Trinity (Year C)

Luke 18.9-14

The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. Or (we may call it) 'the story of the confident person and the person at their wits' end'. Surely, it is that. And surely that is what makes this story one of the most attractive and accessible in the whole of the gospels. It is good to know that people at their wits' end – and we are all at our wits' end at times in our lives – can turn to Gd and be heard.

And, thank Gd, not the story but the underlying message is one that is found in other traditions which have to do with Gd. You'll find it not only in Christianity, but also in Judaism and Islam and elsewhere. The command: never despair of the mercy of Gd. Or, to put it the other way round: do not despair; the mercy of Gd is limitless, and can be for you, whatever the mess you are in. Or: if you have to be at your wits' end before you turn to Gd, still do it; Gd will hear you. I know that many of us hear can bear witness to that. Perhaps we would not be here if we could not bear witness to that. Well and good.

All of that said, today's gospel remains the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. And one thing you may just have noticed about me is that, when the Pharisees are mentioned in the gospels, I like to make an effort to 'rehabilitate' them, to suggest that the traditional Christian portrayal of the Pharisees as 'the baddies' is too simple, and won't do. This is because the Pharisees were the forerunners of the rabbis and so of Judaism as we know it - but also, so historians tell us, actually the group closest to the Jewish Jesus movement, which became the Church. You might think I have my work cut out this time. But here I go.

The Pharisee offers to Gd a review of his life. He fasts, he tithes, regularly and fully. He also – clearly – prays. Fasting, tithing, praying. This means in terms of the three pillars of Jewish piety as the New Testament portrays things, he is doing it. He is pious, devout, faithful.

Perhaps you think he is showing Gd he has earned Gd's attention? That he believes that Gd is naturally distant, or angry, or both, but if he jumps through the set hoops (of which there are many), he can earn Gd's forgiveness and sympathy? The text nothing about this. And that's worth saying again. The text of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector does not say that the Pharisee thought he could earn good things from Gd by all his efforts. And we know from other sources – like, well, the Old Testament itself, that that was not what Phariseeism was about.

No, Phariseeism, like other forms of Judaism, was a religion of grace. Gd has graced the Jewish people with freedom, and undeserved love, and with guidance about how to live. Jews are invited to celebrate all of that by making their own the details of the guidance about how to live. By, for example, fasting, tithing and praying.

In other words, when the Pharisee is reviewing his life, he is doing just what people in the Catholic tradition may do today when they prepare for confession. They/we may even get little booklets to guide one through a review of one's life: Have you been regularly to mass? Have you prayed daily? Have you given to charity? And so on. If you have, and you have, and you have, then say it. Tell the truth. Be honest about it. Be glad that you've had the external opportunity and the internal discipline to fulfil some commandments, to be faithful in what you do.

But that is as positive as I can be about today's Pharisee. For to be clear: he does mess up. What does he get wrong? Not in fairly recording what he did right, but in comparing, or rather contrasting himself with another human being, with the tax collector. And also not like thieves, rogues, adulterers and others.

Brothers and sisters, to do that is spiritual death for any of us. The sin of pride, thinking ourselves above others. Underneath which is often fear. It's the fear (probably one we are not conscious of) that, deep down, life is like this. Life is a narrow ladder and we are a crowd, all competing, scrambling up the ladder. We fear that we can only do that by fighting with others, scrapping, climbing over them, pressing our feet down on their heads, to race up the rungs of the ladder. We may think of this as how this economic life, or how bankers working in the City may think about things. But today's message is that the spiritual life can also be like this.

This brings home to us that 'the Pharisee' is not some exotic alien from a couple of millennia. It's that part of us which thinks we have to compare, contrast, and compete. But there is good news here, because there is a way out. We simply have to note when we are led to compare, contrast and compete, and then cease and desist, resist, move away.

A friend of mine puts it this way. You know the phrase: Love the sinner, hate the sin? No! I haven't got time for that. I haven't got time to discern your sins, to hate them. I am too busy discerning my own sins. He's not saying he thinks he's a terrible person, drowning in sinfulness. He's just saying his own life is the own he has to judge, be discerning about. Other lives he is called just to love.

I have one question for you. What do you think happened next? We know what happened immediately, as Jesus tells us. The Pharisee, thinking himself smugly superior to those around him, goes home unchanged by his praying. The tax collector, at his wits' end and so pouring out his heart, knows the change that comes from being heard by Gd. 'Justified', in the rather technical language of the text.

But, then what? Did the same scene play itself out, day after day, week after week, year after year? We hope not. We hope the Pharisee would get the insight he needed to see that his dismissive attitude to others was killing off his otherwise decent-enough prayers. But do we hope that the tax collector might also change? Might slowly, slowly look at all the concrete ways in which he was a sinner, and work out ways, slowly, slowly no doubt, to change his life?

I think that is probably the import of the story as Jesus (as Luke) tells it. But Christian tradition has also done something else with this story. It has suggested that the bald, heart-felt (heart-felt, bald) prayer 'Lord, have mercy', is one we never leave behind. We know this. We know this because it's also our practice.

Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy...

Lord, in your mercy...

Here we are in some ways echoing the sinning tax collector of today's gospel.

And some, many (many, especially in the East, but by no means only there) many place this prayer for mercy very close to the heart of their own spirituality. What do I mean? I am thinking of the 'Jesus Prayer'. It has different versions. Two especially popular ones:

'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of Gd, have mercy on us.'

'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of Gd, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

It is the prayer of the heart, repeated over and over again. There's an Orthodox monastery not far from here where they recite it daily. They were told to limit it to two hours a day. It is typically recited in line with breathing:

Lord Jesus Christ Son of Gd (in-breath)

have mercy on us (out-breath).

And a traditional posture is to be seated and bend forward. Some say this is the origin of the phrase, 'contemplating your naval'. It looks that way. But really the one praying is adopting the position of the tax collector in today's story.

And I offer it to you. I will share this from my chaplaincy work: it can work against anxiety, if you repeat it, slowly. Just to add: when we pray for mercy, we are not praying just for forgiveness. This is mercy as a much richer concept. A prayer for grace, for grace in the form we need it. That Christ meets us at the point of our need, as the loving, gracious one He is.

Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of Gd, have mercy on us [repeated ad lib.]

Evidence suggests that if we pray like this (like this in some way – I am not being prescriptive) we will find it that bit easier to pray from the heart when (Gd forbid) we are at our wits' end. Amen. 

Sermon, Lent 2: Prepare to be Shocked

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Lent 2 (Year C)

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35

Today's question is this: Which reading did you find most shocking? Which shocked you especially?

I am teasing of course. You don't look at all shocked, and I was not expecting you to. And (open secret...) clergy are not different species from laypeople. We all, I am sure, want to pay attention to the Bible readings, but sometimes in spite of our best intentions, we can all let the readings wash over us. In the Orthodox liturgy, whenever a Bible reading is announced, the response goes out, chanted: 'Let us attend!' For good reason. We need to be prompted to attend. And another open secret is that one role for the sermon may be to give us all a second chance to attend to the readings. I suggest that, today, when we do, there are things which we may well find shocking.

From the First Reading we have what I think we might truly call the 'magical' encounter between Gd and Abram: Gd 'brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars... So shall your descendants be." And Abram believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.' Those words have echoed down through all the centuries of Christian history. Abram/Abraham (same person) is our father in the faith, in pure faith. St Paul says that Abraham here is showing that faith, or trust in Gd, comes before particular rules, commandments and rituals (those of Moses). And that becomes the touchstone of a whole strand of Christianity – Protestantism, and especially liberal Protestantism.

Now, the idea that trust in Gd is more important than following rules is important, and true. If it ever were about making a choice, that is. But when we look at this story of Abram's trust in Gd in context, as in today's reading, we may be shocked to see the contrast doesn't work. Yes, Abram trusted in Gd, and Gd counted that to him as righteousness. But that does not mean Gd downplays the importance of ritual as itself a means of connecting with Gd.

On the contrary, Gd immediately commands... what? A ritual! And Abrham obeys. He takes a cow, a goat and a ram, cuts them in half, adding some birds for good measure. And he waits. This is shocking for us, because it seems a bizarre, even a silly ritual. We're not given any explanation as to why Gd commanded this, though the scholars of course have some theories. But my point is that if we think of Abram/Abraham as modelling naked faith, without dogma and ritual, we will be shocked, when we actually attend to the text.

And so to Paul and his Letter to the Philippians, the Second Reading. I don't think I'll be shocking anyone if I say that, in our days, and actually for a few generations now, Paul has had a bad press. People say he is confusing; he speaks in abstractions. He changes the faith that Jesus had in Gd into faith in Jesus in ways Jesus himself wouldn't recognise – that's another claim. And especially Paul is held to be a cold fish, for slavery and the empire and 'good order', against women, against gay people, even against sex – so they say.

That is quite a charge-sheet. We can't go into it in any detail now. But undoubtedly Paul is a complex character, and it's not going to be absolutely wholly wrong. But! But if these are our thoughts about Paul, we must surely today be shocked at how he writes as someone who is anything but a cold fish.

Hear again how he addresses the Philippians: '[M]y brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.' I can tell you that's a good translation of the Greek; he really does see the Philippians as his beloved, his joy, his crown. And he desires or longs for them. Can't really imagine a buttoned-up, stern headmaster saying any of that. So let us take a moment to deal with the shocking news: St Paul is a warm, loving, emotional father-figure.

What is so shocking about today's gospel? It happens I am not thinking of Jesus's intimations that his journey to Jerusalem will result in the tragedy of his death. That is, frankly, unlikely to shock us, as we know the story, and here we are, deep in Lent. But notice what we can easily miss is the opening: 'At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.”' See? Here the Pharisees are out to help Jesus, to save him.

We are so very used to think of the Pharisees as the arch-enemies of Jesus, even colder-of-heart than Paul, and concerned with tedious details of the laws, rather than with kindness and human flourishing. Modern scholarship says that that is shockingly wrong. Rather, the reason why Jesus and the Pharisees so often seem to be in fierce arguments in the gospels is precisely because they are so close to each other.

Just like us. I mean: we might get into strong arguments with other Anglicans who think differently from us, but who are still Anglicans. Or at least with other Christians. We are less likely to get into such a foreceful oppositional mode with, say, Hindus, as we are not as-it-were 'invested' in Hinduism in the same way (most of us). In any event, here it clearly doesn't work to see the Pharisees as the enemies of Jesus. Shock and horror! They are his allies, his friends.

There is a common thread here, of course. In each case, if, when we come to the details, we find ourselves shocked, it is because we first had prejudices about the characters in question. And the prejudices also take a common (or common enough form):

• we are suspicious of rituals we don't understand, like Abram's admittedly unexplained one today, and so think they are incompatible with faith;
• we judge people, judge even saints like Paul, on the basis of a handful of statements, and so think we know their character, can mind-read their whole attitude to life;
• we divide the world up into our enemies and our friends, and so miss when people who are indeed different from us, like the Pharisees were different from Jesus, are actually trying to help us.

These prejudices, and others like them, are not peccadilloes; they are not trivial failings. They are serious sins which stop us seeing the image of Gd in other people. We deform them, and we are deformed.

Just as we should do all we can to attend to all our Bible readings, so – actually even more so – should we do all we can to attend to the image of Gd in all the people we meet, including those who are nothing like us, and, yes, including those we can't stand.

Am I then suggesting that we give up our prejudices for Lent? Another shock: the answer is a firm No! But this is why: if we give up our prejudices just for Lent, we'd be expected to take them up again at Easter. Which would be devastatingly wrong.

Abram/Abraham, St Paul, Jesus and the Pharisees would all agree that every human being is made in the image of Gd. Indeed, let me go further. I say: unless you are willing to trust in and discern the mystery of the image of Gd in the next person you meet, whoever they are, you do not actually believe in Gd. You might be drawn to ideas about Gd, which are fascinating, comforting and warming. But that is a different thing from faith in Gd. Unless you are willing to trust in and discern the mystery of the image of Gd in the next person you meet, whoever they are, you do not actually believe in Gd. I am sorry if that shocks you. But (one after-shock...) not really. Amen.

To Heaven with Scribes, Pharisees... and all Human Beings

Sermon. 30 August 2015. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford.

Trinity 13 Year B

Deuteronomy 4.1-2, 6-9

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.